Tinee, But Part Of The Story
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #197
There’s a story behind this:
That was 2019 on Google Maps; in more recent years the logo was updated:
Tinee Giant is a very localized convenience-store chain in southeastern Virginia, concentrated right around Norfolk/Virginia Beach. Twenty locations pop up on Google; it’s possible there are a few more out there, but that’s about the size of the chain. At the chain’s peak, in the 1980s, there were 40-50 of them.
It’s a neat little local business story, but that’s not what’s most interesting about it. I’m writing this because it’s actually a follow-up to a piece I wrote a few weeks ago about Giant Open Air Markets, a grocery chain in the same region that had surprisingly large and modern stores for the time period—the 1960s.
Tinee Giant was a smaller concept that Giant Open Air Markets developed, and it’s the only going concern that has any real continuity with the Giant company today. All of the Giant stores were acquired by another regional grocery chain, Farm Fresh, in the 1980s. There are only three Farm Fresh stores left today, all of which are independently owned, as the Farm Fresh chain, itself sold years ago to Supervalu, no longer exists. The grocery business is full of these sorts of twists and turns.
Here’s another one: a couple of the Farm Fresh stores were bought by a Korean grocery retailer, who kept the old chain’s fried chicken recipe around, and added Korean/Asian/international items to the typical American grocery stock.
But Tinee Giant, a pretty much garden-variety convenience store, outlived a pretty groundbreaking supermarket concept, which Giant Open Air once was.
From a 2002 article on local grocery chains:
Amazingly, the Giant brand that survives from this era is Tinee Giant, Giant Open Air’s convenience store subsidiary.
Tinee Giants had a much smaller arch across the front of stores, coupled with vertical sign with clever neon letters that blinked out, one by one, T-I-N-E-E and then Giant. They then flashed all together “Tinee Giant.” It was a sad day when those evocative signs and arches came down, replaced by generic backlit plastic signs. When those signs came down, the stores lost their competitive advantage to 7-Eleven.
Neon or not, Mauro Zenarolla, president of the Virginia Beach convenience store company Coastal Investments, said that the name still has drawing power.
That’s too bad about the signs.
You’d think, and it’s probably the case, that most of the Tinee Giants still in existence go back to the 1980s, when the parent companies were still around, especially since the overall number of locations has been declining. But here’s one that wasn’t branded a Tinee Giant until 2017 or 2018! Before it was just a generic gas station mart:
Here’s another vintage location (pre-new sign):
I love these stories that are both “here’s a little trivia about a small company with an interesting backstory” and “here’s a small company with an interesting backstory that serves as an example of commercial/land-use trends writ large over the decades.”
The story of the Giant Open Air Markets does more of that than the Tinee Giant story does, and in that piece I discussed it all. But the little one is part of the story too, so here you go.
Related Reading:
“Excuse Me, Where’s the Car Aisle?”
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