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 the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)