Across from Andrew's AFB on Allentown Rd ... now a church
Originally a MEMCO
View attachment 176008
We had Bradlee's in 198? ... right after the shopping center opened replacing the original entrance to the Super Chief Drive In
That store no sooner opened then swapped over to a Bradlees then a Hechinger's for many years
View attachment 176009
en.wikipedia.org
Memco
The East Coast stores, located in the Washington, D.C., area, were called Memco instead of Gemco to avoid confusion with an already existing area chain called
GEM. Memco stores had a blue color scheme on its walls and signage. Memco honored Gemco membership cards, and vice versa. Sometimes when an advertisement photo showed a membership card, the first letter in the logo was concealed, so the same picture could be used in both Gemco and Memco ads.
Memco entered the Washington, D.C., market in 1969 with 100,000-square-foot (9,300 m2) stores on Little River Turnpike at Braddock Road in
Annandale, Virginia, and on Allentown Road in
Camp Springs, Maryland.
[5] When the chain announced its exit from the market in December 1982, there were 13 stores (including two in
Richmond, Virginia, one in
Reston, Virginia, and two in the
Baltimore area),
Columbia, Maryland, and
Greenbelt, Maryland, stores had opened just two months earlier, and a 14th store under construction in
Burke, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C.
[6] The closings idled 1,200 retail workers.
[7] All of those locations were converted to
Bradlees upon Gemco's closing.
[8][9] Several of the former locations are currently open as
Home Depot or were occupied by
Kmart before closing. Home Depot near Fairfax Circle in Fairfax, Virginia, used to be a Memco.
Memco also had stores in other locations — for example, one in Arlington Heights, Illinois, one in Niles and one in Lombard — all suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. These stores opened in the early- to mid-1970s. Once they closed, they became Eagle grocery stores.[
citation needed] As of 2015, the Arlington Heights store is a Target store.
