LOWER PROVIDENCE >> When the sign soon comes down at the last remaining Genuardi’s market, in Audubon, the name once synonymous with a local family-run empire will disappear from the landscape forever.
Many of course, would argue that any heirloom connection with the Genuardi’s of yesterday has been gone since 2001, when Genuardi’s Family Markets was sold to Safeway Inc.
In recent years, each of the two dozen Pennsylvania Genuardi’s stores that Safeway acquired had been sold and converted to a Giant or a Weis or simply shuttered.
Until this month, the Audubon Village Shopping Center store, which had debuted at the Pawlings Road end of the center in 1965, on the heels of Jeffersonville, Sandy Hill and East Norriton’s Swede Square and relocating to a larger facility at the opposite end 30 years later, had been hanging tough, like a little mom-and-pop enterprise that time and corporate acquisitions happily forgot.
Longtime fans of the legacy with roots in Gaspare Genuardi’s horse-drawn produce wagon that roamed the streets of 1920s Norristown had helped to keep the lone survivor in business these many years since the sale.
With the store’s lease expiring and Safeway now under the auspices of AB Acquisition, owner of Albertson’s LLC and New Albertson’s, Inc., which is controlled by an investment group led by Cerberus Capital Management, the 40 Audubon employees knew the store’s luck had finally run out.
“It’s the end of the Genuardi era … we’re the last store that will have the Genuardi banner out there because the lease has expired and the landlord and Safeway agreed to exit the market because there’s an opportunity to get another operator in here,” noted John Vuotto, director of employee relations.
Vuotto’s relationship with Genuardi’s goes back 48 years, when he started as a “chicken boy,” then meat manager, moving between Sandy Hill, Jeffersonville and Audubon.
“We’ve been waiting for this to happen; it just happened a little faster than we expected, that’s all,” Vuotto said of the closing, which is slated to happen officially on May 27. “But hearing that we have the opportunity to go with Albertson’s or Safeway is wonderful. Safeway has been great to us and offered all our employees opportunities to work for them.”
As one customer after another stopped to tell him how sad they were to find out their favorite grocery store would be closing its doors, Vuotto admitted it wasn’t easy running a store as large as Audubon with 40 employees.
“We had regulars who shopped here every day, but in the end, it just wasn’t enough,” he said.
The chain that was the Wegmans of its day had been run by Gaspare and Josephine Genuardi’s sons, Tom, Frank, Joe, Jim and Charlie, who immediately set their sights on expansion after opening the West Main Street, Jeffersonville, location in 1954, the first independently owned supermarket in the area..
By the 1960s, the brothers’ 10 sons had gotten into the act, bagging groceries and stocking shelves and ultimately transitioning the chain to new ownership at the dawn of the new millennium.
“Genuardi’s had over 6,000 employees and they still talk about Genuardi’s,” said Vuotto, whose mother, uncles and nephews all worked for Genuardi’s at one time. “I was very lucky with the Genuardi family. They always embraced the people that worked for them to give them opportunity. You can’t say enough about how wonderful they were.”
Although the Genuardi name will no longer be associated with retail grocery shopping, it will continue to have meaning in the philanthropic sense, with the Genuardi Family Foundation.
“I don’t think there are many businesses that have supported the community as much as Genuardi’s during their era, and they’re still taking care of many organizations today,” Vuotto said.
Gina Bickings, director of file maintenance at Audubon, has been working at the store for 38 years.
“I don’t have a bad word to say. It’s been a very good ride,” she said, as longtime manager Victor C. Jones greeted customers entering the store for one of the last times.
“I met a lot of nice people along the way. It’s sad, but it’s another chapter of life I guess,” Bickings added. “We all grew up with Genuardi’s. Our parents shopped here, then we shopped here. We’ll miss Genuardi’s.”
