The Rise and Fall of A&P: How the Biggest Store on Earth Starved Itself

In 1930 A&P ran 15,709 stores and took nearly one of every ten grocery dollars in America. It was the largest retailer on earth, the first to sell a billion dollars in a year, and the federal government prosecuted it for charging too little. Eighty-five years later, on the night before Thanksgiving 2015, the last A&P closed. No rival did it. The company was left to a charitable foundation that needed dividends, and for sixty years it paid out the money that should have built the stores. This is File 002 of The Collapse Files: how billion-dollar companies die. CHAPTERS 0:00 The last night 1:10 The tea men 2:49 Mr. George and Mr. John 5:17 The war on A&P 8:13 The Foundation 11:29 Where Economy Originates 13:13 The Germans 15:16 The A&P mistake Sources include Marc Levinson's The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America; the Wikipedia entry for The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company; Groceteria.com's A&P history; FundingUniverse's company history; Time magazine, "Retailing: Winning with WEO" (1974); Supermarket News archives; and NPR's coverage of the 2015 liquidation. Archival images via Wikimedia Commons, Library of Congress, DPLA and the Allentown Morning Call newspaper archive (public domain), plus: A&P Headquarters.JPG (CC BY-SA 3.0) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Supermarket interior, 1955.jpg (CC BY 2.0) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company Warehouse East View, 150 Bay Street, Jersey City (CC BY-SA 4.0) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Saigon Cafe, former Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, Buffalo, New York (CC BY-SA 4.0) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Archival footage from the Prelinger Archives on archive.org: Shopping Can Be Fun (1957); To Market, To Market (1942); The City (1939); The Story of Selecting Kosher Meat Products (1930); Twenty-Four Hours of Progress (1950); This Is Coffee (1961); Arranging the Tea Table; American Look (1958); America's Distribution of Wealth (1955); A Day of Thanksgiving (1951). Music from the YouTube Audio Library: "Missing Persons" (Jeremy Blake) and "Little Drunk, Quiet Floats" (Puddle of Infinity). Additional scene illustrations were created for this film. Narration is synthetic. #AP #BusinessHistory #RiseAndFall #Documentary #CorporateCollapse #Supermarket