Word: stores
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Fish & Fiddle. Christopher Columbus Smith was born in 1861 in the treetopped village (pop. 1,200) of Algonac, Mich, on the St. Clair River. Algonac was a tough sailors' town situated in the midst of busy Great Lakes maritime commerce. There were a few small hotels, a general store, plenty of canvasback and redhead ducks, walleyed pike, yellow perch, black bass and an occasional sturgeon-and lots of sitting...
...with $40, he opened a stall behind his house in Landerneau, near Brest, offering staple groceries only 8% above cost. Today some 30 Leclerc-sponsored groceries are operating in Brittany, Normandy and central France, and the movement is spreading over the nation. Recently, a rumor that a Leclerc store was about to be opened in Tours dropped food prices...
Friends at Court. France has long needed an apostle in the grocery business. With 300,000 food stores, enough to serve the U.S., with a population nearly four times as great, the French people are forced to pay among the highest food markups in the world. When Leclerc began offering 20% off on staple groceries, with up to 70% off on chocolates, razor blades and other specialties, his Landerneau competitors went to war to protect their entrenched position. They first spread false rumors that he was a tool of the church, French labor unions or the French employers' federation...
Oysters à Leclerc. Last September authorities in Grenoble (pop. 140,000) invited Benefactor Leclerc to open a store there to force down food prices, among the highest in France. Within a month the Leclerc store was doing a monthly business of $60,000, improving the diet of Grenoble families with such unaccustomed luxuries as imported fresh oysters at 42? a dozen, against the usual price of $1.43. Promptly, competitors encircled Leclerc's store with six new cut-price outlets, dropped his volume to $24,000 a month. Said Leclerc: "I did not come here to make money...
...Lackawaxen River (one small bridge later named after Lyman). Poorer kids ate butter, but the Lemnitzer boys got their bread dry or lard smeared. They dutifully did their chores (dishwashing, lawn mowing), earned their spending money at part-time jobs. Lyman clerked at Mike Bergstein's Main Street store, developed an Army-useful talent for shortening pants...