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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883
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Then & Now: Grocery chains take over

Present day: The building occupied by Milford’s Fish House at the corner of Monroe Street and Broadway Avenue was the home of the New Transfer Market from around 1925 to 1929. The upscale restaurant has been around since 1980. (Jesse Tinsley / The Spokesman-Review)
Present day: The building occupied by Milford’s Fish House at the corner of Monroe Street and Broadway Avenue was the home of the New Transfer Market from around 1925 to 1929. The upscale restaurant has been around since 1980. (Jesse Tinsley / The Spokesman-Review)Buy a print of this photo

The successes of retail executives George Christensen and Charles Marr, both prominent in 1920s Spokane, spelled doom for small mom-and-pop stores.

Marr accumulated chains of grocery stores under his company’s name, MacMarr. Christensen worked for the regional chain of Piggly Wiggly stores, which had started in Memphis, Tennessee. Throughout the 1920s, both were building new stores and buying out older stores at a furious rate.

Marr grew up in Missouri, the son of another pioneering grocery retailer. After moving to Spokane, he went from one store in 1909 to 575 stores by 1929.

“It has been like a snowball – it started rolling and we couldn’t stop it,” Marr said in 1929. “We started out to link up the stores of Portland, Seattle and Spokane and, well, it just kept going on and on.”

The success of large chains depended on an extensive supply and transport system, which Marr and Piggly Wiggly had perfected.

Christensen’s Western Piggly Wiggly chain was based on the self-service model started by Clarence Saunders in 1916. Christensen plugged low prices in every ad, including a quart of milk for 8 cents and 10-cent loaves of bread in 1927.

The trend toward chains of bustling self-service supermarkets was working against Anton “Tony” Held, a meat cutter who opened the New Transfer Market at the corner of Monroe and Broadway in 1925. He had separate vendors for fresh fruits and vegetables, dry goods, bakery and tobacco, serving the residents of the near north side. His ads were upbeat and humorous, including this one: “Don’t forget to try some of Tony’s pork sausage, made from little pigs that died happy.”

A Piggly Wiggly opened next door, on Broadway, and Held’s store only lasted until 1929. He went to work in other stores, including Burgan’s grocery stores.

In 1929, Marr’s chain took over Western Piggly Wiggly, keeping the name on the stores. Two years later, a new food company, Safeway, swallowed up Marr’s chain of more than 1,300 stores spread through several Western states. Safeway, owned by the Skaggs family and Charles Merrill of Merrill Lynch, became the dominant grocery chain in the Western U.S. almost overnight. Safeway had more than 3,400 stores in 1932.

After the mergers were complete, Christensen turned his sights toward the Canadian Piggy Wiggly stores while Marr continued working in the Safeway organization.

Held died in 1950 at age 65.

– Jesse Tinsley