Kroger Commercial (Barney's Cleveland; 1984)

[kstarpictures]

Did Barney's have any other stores outside the Cleveland market? Growing up in Memphis, TN back in the early 90's, I seem to remember going to a store with a similar name with my mother. They carried some food items and a limited selection of general merchandise. Can't remember, it's been so long. Memphis definitely IS a Kroger market and still is to this day, so it's possible the store I'm thinking of was Barney's. It wasn't a very large store and shared a shopping center with OscoDrug.

[usa02]

Barney's, Fazio's, Pick-N-Pay, Finast, Tops, Stop-N-Shop, - are all gone. Now all we have is Giant Eagle, Heinen's and of course - Wal Mart.

[paulkersey666]

The voice over announcer in the middle of the commercials is "The Real" Steve Edwards, a former DJ on WNCI in Columbus. Steve Edwards also did the voiceovers for Columbus stores. I don't know whose voice that is at the end, but I also remember him doing commercials for the Columbus stores as well. I'm wondering if both marketing districts used the same ad agency or whether Columbus had responsibility for Cleveland advertising.

[tobyradloff]

I remember Barney's. They were a warehouse-type store that operated in the Cleveland area from 1977 to 1985 (when Kroger closed all of their Northeast Ohio stores, except for Sandusky and Mansfield.) Barney's was in a plain, no-frills setting, in which you bagged your own groceries...and pretty much carried everything a full-line Kroger store carried, although Barney's (as well as another Kroger-operated no-frills chain called Bi-Lo) was heavy on the Kroger and Cost Cutter brands.

[paulkersey666]

@tobyradloff - Hey Toby, this is "Dirty Harry" from the Remembering Retail board. Too bad Kroger didn't hold out in the Clieveland market. Given the way Tops and Fazio's imploded, they might have been the survivor in Cleveland as they are in Detroit. Had it not been for the robber barons on Wall Street, they might still be in Pittsburgh and Cleveland and it might have been Giant Eagle that went the way of the do-do's!

[CoastersNSich]

The jingle also reminds me of the "Count On Us" slogan Kroger used widely in the mid-late 1990s.