Whatever happened to family owned neighborhood grocery stores? You know, the kind that sold a little bit of everything - from bread to screwdrivers. Here's a photo of a store that probably didn't change much from 1930 until the time this photo was taken in 1973. Adair's Grocery was a small store located in Palm Harbor, Florida, on Florida street, a couple of blocks east of Alt. 19. The building is still there, but it's been renovated.This store had old worn, hardwood floors, wooden shelves and the old fashioned red coke cooler with the door on top that slid open and a bottle opener on the side. My family would stop in here every year after picking grapefruit at our friend Mike's house. I don't think I've ever been as hot as I remember the inside of this store was. And I can still remember wandering the back aisles and seeing products for sale that were probably on the shelf for 10 or 20 years, judging by the packaging and the amount of dust and spiderwebs on them! But if I think about it, every Walmart I've been in has the same amount of dust and dirt between the entry doors - what's their excuse?
3 comments:
I was looking at your Blog and the family store broght back a memory of a little family story that was on 43rd St.
Do you have a picture and know the name? I remember we used to get our milk and bread there. Before Big stores like Jewels. The only big store was a&p. any pictures of
the A&P too?
Big Ed
I lived in Palm Harbor in the 70s and 80s. I used to spend a lot of time in Adairs Grocery talking to Mr. Adair and listening to his stories from the past while I was drinking a Coke from that cooler you talked about. There was another old family grocery on Drew Street in Clearwater that went dark about the same time as Adairs. The building in Palm Harbor was later renovated into an old fashioned bank. For a time, the tellers even wore period dress. I moved to Pennsylvania at the end of 1990, so I have no idea what is in the building these days. I now live in Lancaster County, PA, the heart of the Amish farmland. There are tons of these little family grocery stores in existence here and they are thriving. But we are in an area where there is still a lot of horse and buggy traffic on the roads.
Today "Adairs grocery store" is a very popular bar and grill with an Irish theme. It was originally called Peggy O'Neills Irish pub and eatery. Then they shortened the name to just Peggy O's.
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