Southeast Michigan Retail: Motor City Retail History

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...