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.
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“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
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