Power store photos courtesy of City of Toronto Archives
The lone and lonely chattel: My morning walk from my house a few blocks away at 537 Nipigon Street to Oshawa Catholic High School in 1973 meant a walk by the empty Power store supermarket at Rosslynn Plaza at the corner of Rossland Road West and Stevenson Road North, which stood empty except for a perhaps forgotten 1960s-era Vendorama ballpoint pen dispenser. Such is the stuff of abandoned dreams.
Urban landscapes change, sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes suddenly and dramatically. Any visit to a city photographic archive will tell you that. Sometimes it’s the physical landscape; old buildings are demolished or altered through exterior renovation or addition; or empty spaces are in-filled with new buildings. At other times, the change is more subtle. Physically, the building may well look pretty much the same, but its use and signage may have changed. Or just the latter perhaps if a competitor buys up a property to carry on the same type of business.
Right here in Thompson, while the larger signage may still say Canada Safeway at City Centre Mall, if you look at the smaller legal fine print, Thompson’s largest full-line grocer has indeed been owned by Sobeys West Inc. since Nov. 4, 2013, supermarket banner notwithstanding. Safeway has been in Thompson since 1964.
Canada Safeway, with about 29,000 employees and based in Calgary, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the American parent company Safeway, headquartered in Pleasanton, California, making it the second largest supermarket chain in North America, surpassed only by the Kroger Co. of Cincinnati, started in 1883 by Barney Kroger with his life savings of $372.
Safeway got its start in 1915 in American Falls, Idaho when Marion Barton Skaggs purchased a tiny grocery store from his father for $1,089. By 1926 he was operating 428 Skaggs stores in 10 states. Skaggs almost doubled the size of the business that year when he merged his company with 322 Safeway (formerly Los Angeles-based Sam Selig Company) stores. In the 1930s, Safeway introduced produce pricing by the pound and open dating on perishables to assure freshness some of the first parking lots for customers.
A well as Safeway banner stores across Canada and the United States, Safeway also operates under other multiple banners as Vons stores in Southern California and Nevada, Randalls and Tom Thumb stores in Texas, a Genuardi’s store in Audubon, Pennsylvania, as well as Carrs stores in Alaska. None of the Safeway-owned stores in the United States were included in the Sobeys purchase of Canada Safeway.
John William (J.W.) Sobey started in 1907 with a horse-drawn cart as a meat delivery business in Stellarton, Nova Scotia. In 1924, his son, Frank H. Sobey, persuaded his father to expand the family business from meat and a few local vegetables to a full line of groceries. Sobeys tripled its size and became a national company when it acquired The Oshawa Group – a Toronto-based supplier to Canada’s IGA stores – in 1998, although it had opened a grocery store outside Atlantic Canada in Guelph, Ont. as early as 1987. It is now Canada’s second largest grocery chain, sandwiched between industry leader Loblaw Cos. Ltd. of Brampton, Ont. in top place and third place Metro Inc. of Montreal.
Loblaw, the largest food retailer in Canada, was started in Toronto in June 1919 by Toronto grocers Theodore Pringle Loblaw and J. Milton Cork. Bread salesman George Weston started George Weston Limited, also in Toronto, in 1882. Other Loblaw banners include Extra Foods, Shop Easy Foods, OK Economy, No Frills, Valu-Mart, Real Canadian Superstore, Provigo, SaveEasy, Fortinos, Zehrs Markets, Dominion, Red & White Food Stores, Atlantic Superstore, SuperValu, Lucky Dollar Foods, Freshmart, Maxi and Your Independent Grocer.
Before Sobeys Inc. was allowed to complete its $5.8-billion purchase of Canada Safeway, the federal Competition Bureau on Oct. 22, 2013 ordered in a consent agreement with Nova Scotia-based Sobeys that they sell 23 stores in Western Canada to preserve competition in certain markets in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
In the 1960s, growing up in Oshawa, Ontario, my parents liked to shop at the Power store supermarket in the Rosslynn Plaza the corner of Rossland Road West and Stevenson Road North. Power’s slogan was “More Power To Your Food Dollar.”
The origins of Power store supermarkets date to 1904, when Samuel and Sarah Weinstein opened a grocery store named after themselves in downtown Toronto. The family’s first store under the low-cost Power banner opened at Coxwell and Danforth avenues in 1933 with the slogan, “Why Pay for Fixtures?” Power was purchased by Loblaw Groceterias in 1953, but continued as a distinctly separate budget brand until 1972, when its parent company decided to spend $10 million improving its image. Leon Weinstein, the cigar-smoking son of founders Samuel and Sarah who oversaw the company’s expansion years, was briefly president of Loblaw from 1968 to 1970.
And what of that left behind building after the demise of Oshawa’s Power store supermarket in Rosslyn Plaza close to 45 years ago now? The plaza is essentially still a small strip mall more than four decades later and the old Power store has become a subdivided combination of several stores, including a Coffee Time outlet, part of a privately-owned Canadian coffee-and-donut chain started by Tom Michalopoulos in Bolton, Ontario, just northwest of Toronto, in 1982. The company is now headquartered in Scarborough, in the east-end Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Also in the mix is a Lovell Drugs pharmacy, one of the largest, independent drug store chains in Ontario with 12 locations now in Whitby, Oshawa, Kingston and Cornwall, started in Bowmanville, east of Oshawa, by David Stott in 1856 (the business was later joined over the next century by family owners and partners including A.W. Gregory, John H. Jury and generations of Lovells – Edwin, Stan, Everett, Arthur and Diana Lovell. Pizza Pizza and Subway round out the old Power store tenants.
And what of that abandoned Vendorama ballpoint pen dispenser in 1973 in the front window of the empty Power store in Oshawa?
In a Nov 16, 2013 Daily Kos post (the blog started by Markos Moulitsas in 2002) headlined “History 101: Pens and Ink,” the blog editor known as Ojibwa writes, “The idea of using a rotating ball to distribute the ink to the paper was developed by the American inventor John H. Loud. His first patent for a ball dispenser pen was issued in 1888. This first design was intended for writing on rough surfaces, such as cardboard. Loud’s designs – he was issued several more patents – never reached the point of providing the user with the flow of ink needed for good penmanship.
“It was up to László Biro, a Hungarian living in Argentina during World War II, to use a spin-off of war technology to create a pen which could write on paper. In 1943, Lazlo Biro and his brother
György form Biro Pens of Argentina. Their design was licensed for production in the United Kingdom to supply the Royal Air Force who had found that the ballpoint pens worked better than fountain pens at high altitude. In 1945, Marcel Bich bought the patent from Biro and the pen became the main product of his Bic Company.”
In 1960, Victor Vending Corporation of Chicago moved into full production of its Vendorama ballpoint pen dispenser, known as the Pen Vendorama, which revolved and could dispense up to 168 ballpoint pens for a dime each. Different models of Vendorama ballpoint pen dispensers sold pens for either a nickel, dime or a quarter.
Alas, no word on the final dispensation of the Vendorama ballpoint pen dispenser in the window of the Rossland Road Power store, circa 1973.
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