Snapshot: Super Natural Produce - Scranton, PA

Super Natural Produce
Owner: Leopoldo Sanchez

Opened: 2016

Cooperative: Krasdale Foods
Location: 824 Pittston Ave, Scranton, PA

Photographed: December 22, 2018

Here we are at the second, newer, and larger Garcia Market location diagonally across the street from yesterday's store. This store became Super Natural Produce -- whose Reading location we saw a while ago -- in 2016. But the store goes way back, actually all the way to 1937, when it was constructed as an ACME, and its grand opening ad advertised Christmas trees for 50 cents. Or two pounds of grapes for 15 cents. This was the first "supermarket"-style ACME in the Wyoming Valley, a self-service store where customers rolled around their own shopping carts to the various departments of the store. According to the Scranton Times-Tribune, the store "represented a great leap forward...it offered convenience and things not usually found in smaller stores," but a 1995 opinion piece noted that "some people [when ACME opened here in the 1930s] found the supermarket required an act of faith in one respect: a public accustomed to watching a clerk tote up the bill with paper and pencil had a difficult time accepting the touch-type cash registers at the checkout counter."

In 1940, ACME opened a second supermarket in the Wyoming Valley, at 221-223 Wyoming Ave in downtown Scranton. While that one is unrecognizable these days, this Pittston Avenue store retains its original ceramic-style storefront, although the upper part has been painted and had a new awning affixed to it. However, you can just barely see in the first two pictures that the paint above the awning is peeling, slowly revealing the script Acme Markets. It's difficult to see at night, but much easier to see with a more recent street view. (It's since been painted.)

The store takes up a whopping 3300 square feet -- massive by 1937 standards, quite small by today's, when even a store more than 10 times that is on the smaller side for a supermarket. While the south side of Scranton has very few supermarket options, a 29,000 square foot vacancy in a strip mall to the west of here was recently filled by a CTown. A bit west of that is another supermarket, which we'll be taking a look at tomorrow on The Market Report!