History
In 1891, Irish immigrants Samuel Robinson and Robert Crawford began what is now Acme in South Philadelphia. (Some sources trace Acme's beginnings to be 1887 or 1872.) In 1917, Robinson and Crawford merged Acme Markets with four other Philadelphia-area grocery stores; and the new company was named American Stores. Ten years later, smaller rival Penn Fruit began in Philadelphia's Center City, which in the 1950s would compete with Acme in urban shopping centers. In the 1920s, supermarkets under the American Stores banner rapidly sprouted throughout the Philadelphia region, rivaling New Jersey-based A&P, which then featured downtown stores up and down the East Coast, and to New Orleans. American Stores' first round of introducing self-service stores in shopping centers was in the early 1950s.
Read more about this topic: Acme Markets
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It’s an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.”
—Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)