Jewel-Osco


Jewel-Osco is a regional supermarket chain in the Chicago metropolitan area, headquartered in Itasca, a western suburb. In 2025, the company had 189 stores across northern, central, and western Illinois; eastern Iowa; and portions of northwest Indiana. Jewel-Osco has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Boise-based Albertsons since 1999. The company originally started as a door-to-door coffee delivery service before it expanded into delivering non-perishable groceries and later into grocery stores, and supermarkets. Prior to its 1984 acquisition by American Stores, Jewel evolved into a large multi-state holding company that operated several supermarket chains and other non-food retail chain stores located from coast to coast and had operated under several different brand names.

History

Beginnings with home deliveries

In 1899, Frank Vernon Skiff founded Jewel in Chicago as a door-to-door coffee delivery service. In 1902, Skiff partnered with his brother-in-law Frank P. Ross, renaming the venture the Jewel Tea Company. By 1903, they had six routes, then 12 routes in 1904 with expansion into Michigan City, Kankakee, and Kewanee. There were 850 routes by 1915. In the early 1900s, it ran a "coffee train" of 40 cars carrying coffee beans exported from South America.
During WWI, the company faced soaring costs for materials and production. Compounding this, the US government commandeered a key Jewel production facility. As a result, by 1919 the company was experiencing severe financial setbacks. Within a few years, it returned to profitability through the leadership of new company officials: retired Commanders John M. Hancock and Maurice H. Karker, who had both gained extensive logistics experience as US Navy supply officers during the war.
In 1929, the company built a new office, warehouse, and coffee roasting facility in suburban Barrington, Illinois, creating hundreds of local jobs despite the Great Depression. The Barrington location served as the headquarters and main warehouse facility for both the home delivery and food store divisions until the completion of the new warehouse and office complex at Melrose Park in 1953.
In 1949, deliveries were provided on 1876 routes in 43 states to customers mostly in small towns. Customers in cities could visit 154 company-owned grocery stores.
Later, the service expanded to include 350 grocery and 10,000 general merchandise items by 1981 when Jewel sold its "Jewel Home Shopping Service" division to its employees and divest itself from its roots. At the time of the divestiture, the division provided service to customers in mostly small towns located along 1000 routes in 42 states. The division became a 700-member owned cooperative called "J.T.'s General Store" in which route sales persons were independent agents.
In October 1994, a group of the company's managers acquired the assets of "J.T.'s General Store" and "created J.T. Dealers Sales and Service". By 1995, "J.T. Dealer Sales and Service" was providing service to 60,000 customers along 250 routes in 35 states.

Grocery stores

The company's expansion continued throughout the mid-20th century. In 1932, Jewel acquired the Chicago unit of the Canadian firm Loblaw Groceterias, Inc., then a chain of 77 self-service stores, as well as four Chicago grocery stores operated by the Middle West Stores Company, and began operating them under the name Jewel Food Stores. In 1934, Jewel Food Stores merged with Jewel Tea Company. In 1937, Jewel Tea Company purchased an eight-story building in Chicago's Central Manufacturing District, which served as Jewel Food Stores' headquarters until 1954.
The name of the parent company remained "Jewel Tea Company" until 1967 when the stockholders voted to change the name to Jewel Companies, Inc. to better reflect the expansion of the company into different markets. In 1967, the company went public and its stock was traded on the Midwest Stock Exchange.

Eisner acquisition and expansion south

In 1957, Jewel acquired the Champaign-based Eisner Food Stores, located in downstate Illinois and later in west central Indiana. This acquisition was significant since it was the first time Jewel maintained the new acquisition as a separate division within the Jewel organization with the acquired stores keeping their original names, setting the pattern for future acquisitions.
After Jewel's hostile takeover by American Stores in 1984, American Stores decided to save money by merging Eisner directly into Jewel, converting all stores to the Jewel name and slowly started to sell off the former Eisner properties. One of the first properties to let go was the former Eisner warehouse facility in Champaign in 1986. With the Champaign warehouse facility gone, many former Eisner locations became less profitable since they had to be serviced from the more distant Jewel warehouse at Melrose Park, justifying the elimination of those locations. The west central Indiana stores, three in Lafayette and two in Bloomington, were sold off in 1990. Jewel also closed central Illinois locations that were formerly Eisner in Decatur, Champaign-Urbana, and Springfield.

Non-food retail expansion

In 1961, Jewel acquired two growing non-food related retail chains, Chicago-based Osco Drug stores, and Brighton, Massachusetts-based Turn Style discount department stores, to complement their food store division when building one-stop shopping destinations, such as the new Family Centers and Jewel-Osco food-drug combinations. The acquisition of both Osco and Turn Style allowed Jewel to expand into non-food related retailing that would complement their existing food retailing business and also to expand the geographic range of its main food distribution business since the non-food companies had a different geographical footprint.
Jewel expanded into the home improvement retail market by acquiring Republic Lumber in 1972.

1960s–1970s expansion

During the 1960s, Jewel expanded by acquiring several chains.
Jewel expanded their food store holdings by acquiring Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Star Market in 1964 and the Great Falls, Montana-based Buttrey Food Stores in 1966 to add to their existing Jewel and Eisner food store chains.
The acquisition of Star Market also gave Jewel control of Brigham's Ice Cream, which had been a part of Star since 1961. Jewel later sold off Brigham's in 1982.
In 1965, Jewel expanded into the convenience store business by opening Kwik Shoppe, a chain that was quickly renamed White Hen Pantry within a few months.
Before 1970 Jewel stores were typically located on arterial city streets. Between 1970 and 1990, Jewel moved or expanded most of its stores to be freestanding buildings with ample parking. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Jewel built and operated many Jewel-Osco side-by-side stores, but most construction after 1983 consolidated Jewel and Osco stores together as one large store under one roof. Today, the two stores present to the customer as one unit. For instance, a customer can check out any items at Jewel or Osco registers, find Jewel and Osco merchandise commingled throughout the store, and can call one telephone number to reach their Jewel-Osco. Each operating unit retains its own public identity as a "food store" or a "drug store".
The first Jewel-Osco food-drug combination stores were built in 1962. The first Jewel-Osco Family Center was opened in Chicago's Appleton Plaza Shopping center in January 1962.
Jewel opened five stores in Michigan in the 1970s, but closed all five in 1996.
In 1971, Jewel expanded their brand into Wisconsin by acquiring eight failing stores from Kroger and rebranded the stores Jewel. After a decade of operations, Jewel closed all their stores in Wisconsin in 1980. Those locations were sold to Sentry Foods. Jewel did not return to Wisconsin until 1995.
Until 2010, Jewel and Osco stores under the same roof have had separate operations, managers, ordering and receiving procedures, budgets and employees. A 2010 cost-saving measure brought both Jewel and Osco oversight under one store director for each site.
In 1978, Jewel Companies, Inc. attempted to acquire Skaggs Companies, Inc. through an exchange in stock in which Jewel would have been the surviving company and still based in Melrose Park instead of Salt Lake City. A few months later, Skaggs turned down the merger offer. At that time, Skaggs had 229 stores.
After six years, Jewel suffered many losses due to failed marketing concepts and general mismanagement while Skaggs became larger and strong enough to perform a hostile take over of Jewel under its new name: American Stores.

American Stores

made an offer to acquire the Jewel Companies in 1984. The Jewel Companies, Inc. chairman Weston Christopherson was opposed to a merger and Sam Skaggs subsequently engineered a hostile takeover. On June 1, 1984, American Stores tendered an offer worth $1.1 billion for 67% of Jewel's outstanding shares at $70 per share.
For two weeks, Jewel's management refused to comment on the offer, maintaining its silence even at a stormy shareholder's meeting before which Jewel shareholder groups controlling 20% of the company's stock were in favor of negotiating with American Stores. On June 14, Sam Skaggs and Jewel president Richard Cline reached an agreement after an all-night bargaining session. American Stores raised its bid for Jewel's preferred stock, increasing the total bid to $1.15 billion in cash and securities. In return, Jewel dropped plans for a defensive acquisition of Household International Inc. and accepted American Stores' offer. American Stores soon sold Buttrey Food Stores, Star Market, and White Hen Pantry, to pay off debt and for other reasons.

1990s expansion under American Stores

In 1989, American Stores expanded to Florida using the Jewel-Osco name, but operating as a separate division distinct from the Midwestern Jewel-Osco operations. The Jewel name returned to Florida five years after the company closed all of its Jewel-T discount food stores in 1984. Florida was considered a good market for Jewel because of the high number of Chicagoans who had relocated to that state. After three years of operations, American Stores closed those Jewel-Osco stores and sold them to Albertsons in 1992.
To consolidate the names of some of its subsidiaries under one title with nationwide recognition, American Stores renamed some of its Skaggs-Alpha Beta stores to Jewel-Osco in mid-September 1991. American replaced the Skaggs-Alpha Beta name with that of Jewel-Osco on all 76 stores in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arkansas, expanding the chain toward the southwestern states. Within six months, American Stores sold all of the Jewel-Osco locations in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Florida to Albertsons but kept the locations in the state of New Mexico for a few more years.
In 1998, American Stores rebranded the Jewel-Osco stores in New Mexico to Lucky/Sav-on, a grocery store/drug store brand which American Stores had used in neighboring Arizona. After the acquisition of American Stores by Albertsons just a few months later, the New Mexico stores were rebranded again to Albertsons Sav-on in 1999.
Under American Stores, Jewel returned to Wisconsin by opening a Jewel-Osco store in a new shopping center in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 1995. Jewel returned to Milwaukee in 1998 by purchasing a Pick 'n Save store and four Cub Foods stores and converting them into Jewel Osco stores.