Radio Script #634

Little Talks on Common Things

December 27, 1964

Almost every Maine adult knows that the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, what we call the A & P, originated in the brain of a Maine man. It is time we told on this program the story of George Hartford, founder of the A and P.

First let us have a little background. For nearly a hundred years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the common beverages were cider and beer. Water was regarded as unhealthful to drink, and milk was very scarce, even if the settlers cared to drink it, which most of them did not.

Shortly before 1700 a new beverage became popular: rum from the islands of the West Indies. At first it was distilled in the islands from the native molasses, but the canny Yankees soon discovered that it would be more profitable to bring the molasses up from Barbados and other Caribbean ports and do their own distilling right here in New England. By 1750 no fewer than 15 distilleries were operating in the Boston area alone, and the best New England rum sold for two shillings a gallon, equivalent to 33 cents. So alcoholic were the customary colonial beverages that John Adams once remarked: “If the ancients drank too much wine and became possessed of devils, we can say no better of our people today who fill themselves with rum and cider.”

Tea had come to England about 1650, some 30 years after the Pilgrims left the mother country. But for the next half century it was very expensive, selling in London at prices from 6 to 10 pounds per pound. Remember that the purchase power of the English monetary pound was at that time worth about $25. Put another way, in 1700 it would take the wages of a London laborer for seven full weeks of six days each to pay for a single pound of tea. Obviously only the wealthy could indulge in the new beverage from China.

Coffee reached England about the same time as did tea, but was never so popular, despite the large number of so-called coffee houses in London and the larger cities. Those houses played a large part in 18th century social life in London, as we are told in Boswell’s Life of Johnson and other books. But by Johnson’s time the beverages served there were more often beer and ale than either coffee or tea. As for the British citizen, he definitely preferred tea to coffee, as he does to this day. The American colonists, being predominantly British, likewise preferred tea.

History contains no record of a Boston Coffee Party, but every schoolboy knows what happened to tea on which the authorities tried to collect the unpopular tax in Boston. In fact, for many decades, tea in America was really a more palatable drink than was coffee. The colonial coffee was not at all what fine blended coffee is today. The modern packer makes careful blends of several different coffees from different parts of the world, each adding its particular flavor. But in the colonies coffee was simply coffee. It was not only unground, it was green. Before it could be made ready for breakfast, it had first to be roasted, and in the days before brick ovens, that had to be done in a pan over an open fire. The results were decidedly uneven. Then it had to be ground. Tea, on the other hand, could be steeped just as it came from the China chests.

That distinction, having much to do with preference for tea, lasted well into the nineteenth century, and it was the situation that prevailed when George Hartford reached the age of 21 in 1854. George had been born in Augusta, Maine in 1833. There he went to school and took on odd jobs in town. For a time he worked in a general store on Water Street. Although he was 16 years old when gold was discovered in California, he seems not to have been bitten by the gold bug, as were many boys no older, or perhaps his father insisted that he remain at home until he was 21. Anyhow he was 24 when he did heed Horace Greeley’s injunction, “Go west, young man, go west!” Other Maine youth had heard that call. Twenty years before Greeley published the advice in his New York Tribune, Elijah Lovejoy had left his Albion, Maine home for St. Louis and other Mississippi River towns.

Somehow George Hartford was not as pleased with the St. Louis area as was Lovejoy. Hartford left after a few weeks, but he did not return to Maine. He went instead to New York, and there in 1859 he tried out his first unique merchandising idea. When a shipload of tea came into New York, after a long voyage around the Horn from China, its cargo was bought by importers, resold by them to wholesalers, who sold to retailers, and thence to the public. That made three price mark-ups on the tea before it reached the consumer.

Hartford conceived the idea of buying a whole cargo of tea and selling it to housewives right at the dock. No one seems to know where he got the money to buy a whole shipload of tea, but buy it he did, and he later boasted that he sold it for less than half what the consumers had usually paid, and still made a good profit. It must indeed have been profitable, for George Hartford continued to sell tea the rest of his life.

Yet the young man from Maine at once saw that he would have to improve on his dockside scheme. It took too long to get rid of a cargo that way. It was inconvenient for his customers, mostly women who had to come a long way from their usual shopping area. So what Hartford did was take a leaf out of the book of the greatest showman of the time, the circus man P. T. Barnum.

Barnum’s Museum on Park Row in New York was drawing immense crowds to see the Cardiff Giant, Tom Thumb, and other Barnum curiosities. The smart young tea merchant saw a chance to take advantage of Barnum’s crowds by opening a tea store directly across the street from the museum. It was more than just another store; nothing like it had been seen in New York. For a sign it displayed a large, gilded letter T to represent the product sold. The store front was painted a bright vermilion red with gold trimming, colors that gave the place such distinction that red and gold became the familiar color of every A & P store when those emporiums began to spread across the continent. Inside the walls were lined with gaily painted bins, containing various kinds of tea. All about the room were hung Japanese lanterns, and the cashier’s desk was shaped like a Chinese pagoda.

Another trick that Hartford learned from Barnum was to attract the ear as well as the eye. Every Saturday evening during the first summer the store was open, Hartford hired a brass band to put on a concert in front of the building. In a short time the enterprising merchant had to engage extra help to serve his Saturday night crowds.

But George Hartford was a real business man, not just an attention getter. He knew that glaring colors and noisy bands would attract a tu~tom~r ont~, but only low prices and good quality would keep that customer coming. So he stocked the best tea and sold it cheaper than people could get it elsewhere. In less than two years he had outgrown the location and had to move into a larger building. Then he decided he must reach people who couldn’t get easily to his store, and he started one of New York’s earliest mail order departments. He ran advertisements in papers and magazines that reached people outside the city, and orders came in rapidly. He now added coffee to his line of teas.

Hartford was already doing a prosperous business in New York when his eyes turned again westward. Ten years after he bought that shipload of tea and sold it at the dock, the first transcontinental railroad was opened. The year was 1869 and Hartford did not immediately set up business in the West. He did something smarter. He took advantage of what the new rail service could mean to his tea. He advertised in widely circulated magazines that he could deliver mail orders for tea that only a month earlier had been in China, instead of tea that had taken four months to come by ship around the Horn. At the same time Hartford opened his first stores outside New York City — one in Boston and another in Philadelphia. Within the next ten years he had one in most of the cities of the East Coast.

Perhaps George Hartford had no intention at that time to start stores west of the Alleghenies. But the great Chicago fire offered too much of a temptation. Within a month of the fire Hartford opened his first Chicago store, and by 1880 he had 95 stores from Boston as far west as Milwaukee. That year his son George, a boy of 15, went to work as cashier in the old store on Vesey Street in New York and in 1888 his second son John joined the business.

Long before the boys joined him, George Hartford had in 1870 taken advantage of the public talk about transportation at last being available across the country. The words Atlantic & Pacific were on everyone’s lips. So instead of the George Hartford Company, this man from Maine then gave his enterprises a new name, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.

Long before the boys joined him in the 1880’s Hartford had begun to add other items besides tea and coffee to his stock. He first added spices and sugar, then other staples until by 1890 the housewife could get all her groceries at the A & P. Not until well into this century, with the coming of the supermarkets, were meats to be found in those stores, and it was not much earlier that they sold perishable vegetables and fruit.

George Hartford was owner of more than a hundred stores before there was any such thing as individual packaging. I am by no means young, but I am not old enough to remember a time when the grocery store did not have ground spices, Arm and Hammer soda, Bakers Cocoa, and a few other items in ready-to-sell packages. But even in my boyhood most groceries were sold in bulk, as indeed they all were when Hartford began his first A & P.

With his many stores George Hartford was still not reaching the rural population. He was not the first to use the peddler’s cart. It had operated allover settled parts of the continent long before he was born. It was a tried and accepted method which Hartford saw ready at hand. Whether A & P or Grand Union or some other such company first used carts for house to house rural calls is not important. Many of the chain stores did it. At any rate A & P built a big fleet of gaily colored wagons and drove them allover the countryside. They continued until driven out by the Motor Age.

Of course many changes have come to the business since George Hartford died. He would not recognize a modern supermarket. But the next time you pass such a place with the familiar sign of A & P, remember it all started with a fellow born in Augusta, Maine 132 years ago.

Year: 1964