Southeast Michigan Retail: Motor City Retail History

  The following is (mostly) a SMR:MCRH Contributor Post. This post will look at retail in Garden City, Wayne County, MI. Rite Aid #4466 29447 Ford Road, Garden City, MI Driving distance and time from downtown Detroit: 17.0 miles, approx. 25 minutes   Our second consecutive Rite Aid post keeps us in the past, and indeed so inside and out. Located in downtown Garden City, just a short walk from the former site of the world's first official Kmart (recently razed for an LA Fitness) and right behind Michigan's first dining-room McDonald's (seen undergoing a complete rebuild in the foreground in the above photo, the only one in this post that I took), sits this Rite Aid, which still looks pretty much like it did when it opened here on September 11, 2000, replacing an ex-Perry Drugs (in a former National Supermarket building) less than a half-mile away on Middlebelt Road. To get the grist of how unique this Rite Aid's exterior is from others of that era, we turn to Former Reta...

The following is a SMR:MCRH Contributor Post. This post will look at retail in Taylor, Wayne County, MI. Rite Aid #4366 9155 Telegraph Road, Taylor, MI Driving distance and time from downtown Detroit: 18.1 miles, approx. 25 minutes   Welcome to another post made possible by Former Retail Employee/Y4123 and welcome to the present as we bring you to Taylor's last Rite Aid. This peaked-roof location lies at the corner of Telegraph and Wick Roads, and opened in 1997, replacing the former Perry Drugs #66 just a half-mile up Telegraph (in a former centennial A&P that now houses the Luck Star Buffet).   The exterior was recently repainted and updated to display the new logo that Rite Aid debuted earlier this year, accompanied by a direction shift for the company. It should be noted that there is a Walgreens directly across the street from this store.   The modernness stops right here, however, as we head inside, where we are sent back to 1997.   That's right, the interi...

The following is a SMR:MCRH Contributor Post.   This post will look at retail in Warren, Macomb County, MI.    Kroger Michigan Division #776 31200 Schoenherr Road, Warren, MI Driving distance and time from downtown Detroit: 16.6 miles, approx. 30 minutes   Updated January 16, 2021 with corrections (this is actually not a Kroger Marketplace like I had initially thought).   For this post, Former Retail Employee/Y4123 brings us to the second-newest Kroger Michigan Division store (at the time of writing, anyway). Kroger #776 welcomed its first customers on the morning of October 23, 2019 on the former site of Kmart #4204 and replacing former Kroger #674 one mile up Schoenherr Road (that particular Kroger store first opened in 1978, closed and became Steiner's Foodland during a 1984 union strike, and reverted back to Kroger circa 1999!). This store bears the recent Kroger wooden exterior design that was in use as early as 2017 and was last used in early 2020. It sho...

  This post will look at retail in Riverview, Wayne County, MI.   Citgo #11799145 12647 Pennsylvania Road, Riverview, MI Driving distance and time from downtown Detroit: 16.6 miles, approx. 25 minutes   This gas station's story started in 1955, as that was when a Mobil gas station opened at the southeast corner of Pennsylvania and Quarry Roads. The address? 12647 Pennsylvania Road. Competing with it across Quarry Road was Kreger's (and later Chuck's) Standard at 12705 Pennsylvania Road. That station disappeared without fanfare in the late 1970s (not even being given the chance to convert to Amoco), with a Lawson's convenience store (later converted to Dairy Mart and currently Circle K) built on the site in 1980. As for the Mobil, it had quietly become a Union 76 by the early 1980s. In 1997, the station flipped to Citgo under a 10-year contract, which ended in 2007 with another switch to Valero (which was beginning to expand into Michigan around that time) under a ne...

 The following is a SMR:MCRH Contributor Post. This post will look at retail in Van Buren Charter Township, Wayne County, MI. Kmart #3155 2095 Rawsonville Road, Van Buren Charter Township, MI Driving distance and time from downtown Detroit: 31.3 miles, approx. 35 minutes   It's been over one year since it's closure was announced, and so, for the second SMR blog post with photos from Y4123 (a.k.a. Former Retail Employee), we will be taking a mid-closure tour with him of the Van Buren Charter Township Kmart, photos taken in November 2019. The Van Buren Charter Township Kmart opened for business on April 8, 1974, anchoring a new strip mall across Interstate 94 from Willow Run Airport, directly along the Wayne-Washtenaw County line, midway between Belleville and Ypsilanti. The only major change the store had seen was getting the usual "Big Kmart" treatment in the late 1990's, though here even the exterior was remodeled. While escaping numerous spins of Sears Holdi...