The Retail Photographer's Testimony

In celebration of what would have been my 5th anniversary on Flickr, here's the story of how we got to where we are now.

Looking through the pages of this Blog and my Flickr, you may notice I've got photos going as far back as 2011. That's how long I've had an interest in this, even though I never published anything up until 2015. It all began when A&P filed for bankruptcy, and as a result shut down quite a few stores. At the time, that meant nothing to me; however, the fact that my local SuperFresh was on that list did. I'd been shopping there as long as I had been alive, granted it was much less often in recent years. The store had really gone downhill, our family changed allegiance to Genuardi's (ironically the second store closure I documented, less than a year after this one). Regardless, it was still my store and it meant something to me.

While snooping around online trying to find some confirmation to the rumors that SuperFresh was closing, I stumbled across Acme Style's post on the already-closed Bristol SuperFresh. In short, that blog sucked me down the rabbit hole. Over the next few days, I read every post on that site. I was hooked. It pulled my interest over to ACME, a chain I had previously held an indifferent opinion about. Call it an obsession, for most of middle school I worked "ACME" into every online username I made. I first picked the Plaza ACME name, snatched from a local strip mall named for its anchor, for a huge complex I'd built on my friend's Minecraft server (That's gotta be one of the most 2013 eighth-grader things you've ever read). I sorta became identified with the name, and grew rather fond of it.

2013 was also the year I got a new point-and-shoot camera and a 16-GB memory card. Almost instantly, I started taking it with me whenever I went on the road. I'd take pictures of every store, restaurant, or gas station we passed. While I've gotten a little more selective over the years, not much has changed on that front. Except that I'm the one driving now and have to wait for red lights to get pictures. I've been through a couple cameras since then, but still keep that one as a backup. I've needed it a few times. One of my newer cameras got eaten by my dog, and another happened to be on me when I got caught in an unexpected downpour. Lessons have been learned, but I'm still keeping my old one.

Through Acme Style, I discovered The Caldor Rainbow, which I read in its entirety within two days of finding it. While the blog is no longer active, he's still around on Flickr. His site was my first exposure to vintage fast food, malls, and discount stores and deserves credit for broadening my horizon beyond just supermarkets. Acme Style also introduced me to JoshAustin610 on Flickr, who at this point has photographed basically every store between Baltimore and New York. His page is not only a great source of information and the first place I go when I find a store I want to know more about, but has helped me find so many places to photograph. If it weren't for him, I don't know if I would have ever found my all-time favorite store, may it rest in peace.

The third photographer Acme Style introduced me to was the Albertsons Florida Blog, who at the time also had a Flickr page (which just like mine, remains up but trimmed to the 1,000 photo limit because they priced us out). I haven't spent much time in Florida, probably about 4 weeks lifetime total, but he had coverage of the one Walmart I went to while I was there. After going through the entire photostream, I decided it was time to make myself a Flickr page. I certainly had enough photos to get started. Given its retail-based origin, I felt the Plaza ACME name would be a suitable username. That day, I happened to be home from school with a cold, so I wound up dumping like 100 photos on my page since I had nothing better to be doing. The rest is history and where I most likely first interacted with you. I'd like to thank some of my first followers- the people linked above, Retail Retell, BatteryMill, B-More Retail, Coolcat4333, and Random Retail. 

Everybody in the community has their niche, one store chain their photostream/blog focuses on more than the others. Despite my screen name, ACME wasn't where I happened to fall. I've covered a number of them, but in terms of how aggressively I've covered them they fall short of two local defunct "Family Markets" chains- Clemens and Genuardi's. In terms of percentage of their store base covered, I've got more of them represented than any other chain (if you were wondering, by number I have more Giant's covered- 51 by my last count. Ironically about half of them were formerly part of the other two chains). I was fortunate enough to grow up with both of them. The smaller chain Clemens, was acquired by Giant in 2006. Larger Genuardi's (who had the world's best donuts) was shut down by Safeway between 2012 and 2015. To date, I've photographed all but one former Clemens and over three quarters of the former Genuardis'. It's my mission to have all of their stores photographed one day in the near future.

As you know, about 3 and a half years after I began using Flickr, they were sold to Smugmug, who ended the essentially unlimited photos for free accounts. As this is a hobby not a profession, I opted to move onto a blog instead. This blog had been around a while before, but was basically just a "bonus content" supplement to my Flickr presence where I would drop the occasional shitpost every couple months. If you go all the way back, they're all still up on here. Blogger gets the job done, but I do still miss how personal the interaction on Flickr was. Regardless, I would say I made a successful comeback Flash forward to the present, and here we are. Here's to the next five years!

Have a Genuardi's donut for the road!