9 minute read
HOMEtown Reflections
Nalevykin Food Store, 204-33rd Street West, ca. 1940.
Photo Credit: Local History Room - Saskatoon Public Library - A-1482
Part 2 of 2
by: JeFF o’brien
Rise of the Supermarkets
Although chains like Safeway and OK Economy arrived here in the 1930s, the modern, supermarket style of grocery store that we’re all familiar with is a product of the post-war boom. It’s a child of suburban sprawl and of the automobile, as people forsook the cozy inner city neighbourhoods for the wide open spaces of Greater Suburbia.
The automobile meant grocery shoppers weren’t limited to how far they could walk and how much they could carry, or to the availability of home delivery. Home refrigeration also boomed after World War II, which would have reduced the need for frequent trips to the grocery store. Finally, the new suburbs were overwhelmingly residential. While neighbourhood planners did set aside space for commercial activities, they were fewer and farther between than in the older neighbourhoods.
But it didn’t matter. In these new, post-war cities, the automobile was becoming
a necessity. And if you had a car, you didn’t need a corner store.
By 1965, Saskatoon had three big supermarket chains: Safeway, Loblaws and OK Economy. That year, IGA joined the crowd, picking up several small, neighbourhood stores and later building two larger Foodliner stores on 8th Street East and 20th Street West. That meant there was no part of the city that didn’t have a sizable chain store within striking distance.
But the corner groceries didn’t go down without a fight. Stores like the Capitol Food Market on Broadway began offering free delivery again. So did the IGA, possibly as a way to make its smaller, neighbourhood stores competitive. Many of the corner stores got out of the grocery business almost completely, depending on cigarettes and chocolate bars for most of their profits. There were also specialty stores, catering to specific markets or clientele.
But every year, the numbers grew smaller. In 1962, we counted 115 stores in the city directory under
OK Economy Store, 8th Street near Clarence, 1964.
Photo Credit: CoS Archives - 1100-2010-12
“Grocers—Retail.” By 1992, there were only 83 including many that are clearly just convenience stores. But again, it isn’t the number of stores, but the ratio of stores to people that tells the story. This had been rising steadily since the Second World War. In the early 1960s, at a rough count, the ratio was about a thousand people per grocery store. This was more than twice what it had been in the 1930s. By 1992, it had doubled again, to more than 2,000 people per store.
“We’re going to go Broke”
The death blow for many older neighbourhood stores was the opening up of
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XL Grocery at 901 Avenue C North, 1967.
Photo Credit: CoS Archives - 1100-1768-03 XL Grocery building, 2021.
store hours in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Under provincial and municipal legislation, most stores were required to close at 6:00 pm every night except Thursday, and to remain closed all day Sunday. One of the few exceptions were grocery stores under a certain size, which were allowed to stay open until 10:00 pm. Charging that the legislation was unfair to them and that the Sunday closing provisions violated religious rights, the big grocery store chains went to court over it, simultaneously ignoring the laws and daring the authorities to do their worst. In 1988, the province washed its hands of the whole thing, leaving regulation of store hours entirely up to the cities. Saskatoon held two plebiscites on the question in 1988 and 1991. When the dust finally settled, late-night shopping and Sunday opening were the law of the land.
In a newspaper interview in 1987, Sadrudin Sajan, who with his wife ran the Riversdale Grocery on
Photo Credit: Jeff O'Brien
Avenue H South, predicted that de-regulation of store hours would have disastrous consequences. “We’re going to go broke,” he said. As it turned out, he ran the store another twenty-five years until his death in 2012. But other store owners were either not as lucky or not as capable.
The great Food Desert
In 1930, the vast majority of people in Saskatoon lived within at most two to three blocks of a grocery store. By the 1970s, that was no longer the case. Today, we often talk about “food deserts”— places where there are no stores selling basic groceries. Downtown Saskatoon, which in recent memory had three big chain grocery stores—a Dominion in the Midtown Plaza, a Safeway at Bayside and an OK Economy—is now unable to support anything more complicated than a Dollar Store and a 7-Eleven. Similarly, it used to be that close to half of Saskatoon’s grocery stores could be found within a few blocks on either side of 20th Street, including one of the first Safeway
Lloyd Reid at Reid's Shop Rite, later the Riversdale Grocery, 617 Ave H South, 1959.
Photo Credit: Local History Room - Saskatoon Public Library - B-5145
Photo Credit: CoS Archives - Star Phoenix Collection - S-SP-B-29240-002
stores to open in Saskatoon, at 20th Street and Avenue O, which opened in 1930. It later moved down the street to the corner of Avenue D, and then up to Avenue H when a big, modern supermarket was built in 1962. Today, they’re all gone.
Connecting Past to Present
Even when these old stores close, the buildings often remain, making a physical connection between the present and past. Some are obvious. The little store at 208 Avenue I North that Johnston Purdy opened in 1915 is now someone’s house. But with the false front stuck on it like something off the Western Development Museum’s Main Street, it can’t have started life as anything other than a store. The same goes for the erstwhile XL Grocery at 901 Avenue C North, except in this case, it’s the front door cut into the corner of the building that gives it away. Then there’s Mike’s Grocery at 724 28th Street West, which looks exactly like every other house on the street except for the weathered sign that still (as of this writing) hangs above the door.
Sadru Sajan’s grocery store on Avenue H is still there. The windows are dark and dusty now, and when you peer through them, it’s all empty shelves inside. No one lives there anymore. But if you grew up around there, you probably remember him. Or if you’re a little older, his predecessors, Lloyd “Tiny” Reid, who ran it as Reid’s Shop Rite from 1959 to 1978, and before that his parents, Russell and Katherine, who operated a store at that address under several names as far back as the 1920s.
Down the street at the corner of Avenue H and 18th Street is a stylish coffee-andsandwich shop called One Drip. But when it was new in 1911, it was John Bertram’s grocery store. It stood next door to the family’s handsome brick house, which still stands. From 1931 until about 1950, it was one of several independentlyowned Rex groceterias before becoming a Shop Rite in the 1950s and ‘60s. By the 1970s it was a pawnshop. By the 1990s it was something called Cash for Cans before eventually being caught up in the wave of gentrification that has swept through that part of town in recent years.
On the east side of the river, the corner of Temperance and 14th, where D’Lish by Tish
is now, has been a great many things over the years. People of a certain age may remember that there used to be an OK Economy store there, along with Walker’s Drugs. But when the building was first constructed in 1921, it was John Rathburn’s grocery store.
Of more recent vintage is the grocery store on Early Drive just down from Brevoort Park School. It was the Magnus Shop Rite when it opened in 1965 and later became a Red-and-White Store. The tiny strip mall next door had a drugstore, confectionery and barber shop. They’re gone now, too.
Still going Strong
But some of these old stores are still there. Westmount Foods on 29th Street is a good example, and there’s been a grocery store on the corner of Clarence and 12th Street since 1915, although it would have looked rather different from the current one. Once a property is zoned for commercial uses, it tends to stay that way, so that even though the grocery
Photo Credit: Jeff O'Brien
store on the corner is long since closed, there’s still a business there, frequently in the same building that once, decades ago, was someone’s mom-and-pop store, with living quarters in the back and a couple of apartments above.
Into the modern era
It’s all different now. Where we once shopped in supermarkets, nowadays we’re likely to make a trip to some sprawling, big box where the line between grocery and department store has been blurred almost into non-existence. At the other end of the scale, the convenience store niche is mostly filled these days by huge chains like 7-Eleven and Mac’s. And the internet, of course. Because the internet changes everything it touches.
Still, there are echoes of the past in this shiny, digital era. Like the Walmarts of today, both Eatons and the Hudson’s Bay stores once had busy grocery departments. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the big grocery chains started delivering again, just like back in the 1940s. And thanks to Amazon, you can now get your groceries by mail order and have them shipped to your door in Saskatoon. Just like in 1917.
Jeff O’Brien
