The Independent Edition

Coming Street Grocery Owner: Hany Zayan Opened:  2011 under current ownership Cooperative:  none Location:  224 Coming Street, Downtown, Charleston, SC Photographed:  January 2022 As I mentioned yesterday in my post about the Coming Market , my personal research focus lately has been on neighborhood, mom-and-pop-type grocery stores, but specifically in the New England region. Today, we get to dip our toes in the water of South Carolina mom-and-pop grocery store history with the Coming Street Grocery, a longtime grocery store at Coming and Spring Streets in downtown Charleston. This building is a beautifully preserved grocery relic in one of the many historic districts of Charleston, likely dating back to the early 20th century at least. While it doesn't look like much of the historical charm is present inside the 1300 square foot store anymore, the outside certainly has plenty of charm. As a matter of fact, either reproductions or restorations of old painted advert...

Doscher's IGA Owner: Johnny Doscher III Opened:  1974-2022 Cooperative:  IGA Location:  1133 Savannah Hwy, West Ashley, Charleston, SC Photographed:  January 2022 Today's store tour is a very interesting one! We begin with my history with the store. I received an email from a reader back in April 2020 about A&P decor, and this reader ended up sending me a few pictures of this Doscher's IGA. (Those are the first two, daytime pictures we see here. It occurs to me that I never asked if or how you'd like to be credited, so if you see this, please let me know if you'd like me to credit you by name!) I was fascinated by the fact that this store is immediately next door to a Whole Foods and has coexisted with the Whole Foods since 2018. I was also fascinated by the decor inside, which we'll see shortly. So thanks for these daytime pictures! Now onto my own pictures, and some history of the store itself. We're also touring the Whole Foods today, which you can c...

  Up next -- we head to Charleston! And a few other towns around it in South Carolina. We begin to the northwest of the city in Summerville, then we wander through West Ashley and other northern parts of Charleston (note: not North Charleston, a separate city), before heading straight into downtown. We'll make one stop east of Charleston in Mount Pleasant, then travel out to Folly Beach on the coast outside of Charleston. Folly Beach is on Folly Island, one of the many islands off the coast of South Carolina, and we'll be exploring several of them. After Folly Island, we'll stop by Johns Island, Kiawah Island, and finally Wadmalaw Island. That's going to take us about a month, so sit back and enjoy! This is an interesting area, and it's also one I visited recently (January 2022, as a matter of fact) so it's pretty fresh in my memory. Hopefully, that makes for more exciting blog posts. As always, thanks for reading and following me all around the area and I'l...

Quik N Save Owner: Yogendra Shah Opened:  unknown Cooperative:  none Location:  3234 Cromwell Dr, Norfolk, VA Photographed:  January 2020 I'm not too much of a fan of convenience stores, but this roughly 2300 square foot store caught my eye mostly because of the sign on its roof. You can't see it too well unless you zoom in and really focus, but there's actually (above the Convenience Store sign) a series of individual letters spelling out MARKETS. I can't find anything on what this was previously, and because of the building's size and apparent age I doubt "markets" referred to a full grocery store, but instead I bet it was a chain convenience store. It's not the oldest or most exciting relic out there, but I thought it was worth snapping a picture of nonetheless. Tomorrow, we're heading about two and a half miles southeast for a look at two supermarkets and one former supermarket in the Janaf area!

 Look at that, we're moving on to our next mid-Atlantic group tomorrow! And yes, there's a slightly different banner design here prompted definitely by my desire to update the blog's look to keep it trendy and modern, and definitely not prompted by the fact that an unfortunate incident involving an external hard drive lost about a year and a half worth of stuff that I had saved. Anyway. We are moving on to the greater Norfolk area, and this part of Virginia is referred to as Hampton Roads. Virginia Beach and Newport News are some of the other cities in this area, although we won't be visiting Newport News sadly. As I mentioned yesterday, this is not the most exciting group of stores simply because I was only in the Norfolk area for a family reunion, which is not the most conducive to photographing large quantities of supermarkets. But I was able to get some, so we'll be spending about two weeks in the Norfolk area. Come back tomorrow to jump right into a store tour ...

Matthews Market Owner: Bruce Matthews Opened:  1991 Cooperative:  none Location:  14141 Lankford Hwy, Mappsville, VA Photographed:  December 2019 As devoted readers of my blogs will know, I enjoy visiting the unique and out-of-the-way stores. So when I drove by the Matthews Market in Mappsville, VA, I knew I had to see it. And it didn't disappoint. Although the 5500 square foot store is on the older side and a bit dingy, it didn't disappoint. It's packed full of a huge range of groceries given its small footprint. The store opened in 1991 in a former IGA, but I don't know if it was previously a different supermarket before the IGA. A local news outlet did a great profile of the store back in 2016 for the store's 25th anniversary. Let's head in and check out what's inside! In the first aisle, all the way to the left, we have frozen foods and produce, plus lots of snack and candy items. We have, coincidentally, two very different height photos from this same...