Winn-Dixie - Power to the (Beef) People

A billboard flies past as cars streak down the highway at night, sometime in 1970. Instead of the exit number for the nearest Holiday Inn, or a pitch for a tourist attraction such as Weeki Wachee Springs, we see a great big steak, the stock-in-trade of Winn-Dixie and Kwik Chek supermarkets. Uncooked, no less – a practice that thankfully is rarely (no pun intended) the case in supermarket

The Sixties Winn-Dixies

A set of views from the 1960’s, an exciting time in the history of Winn-Dixie. By the early sixties, Winn-Dixie was impressing the socks off of the financial community, and as Forbes magazine put it in 1962, was “the envy of the nation’s grocers”. In an industry that has always depended on gargantuan volume at a tiny profit percentage (typically 1 to 1.5 percent after taxes), Winn-Dixie, at

The Boomin' Winn-Dixie

“Not much time for banjo strummin’For the mills are busy hummin’Pine tree crops – citrus, cattle –And chemicals, too,Cover Dixie like the dew!Our food business, too, is zoomin’‘Cause this NEW Southland’sreally boomin’!”- advertising verse from 1955Up until the mid-20th century, it would be accurate to say that the industrial production of the Southern states lagged behind other parts of the

Winn-Dixie's Family Tree

The roots of Winn-Dixie’s “family tree” can be traced back to two small grocery stores in 1920’s Florida. The first of these was a wholesale grocery unit in northeast Florida, purchased by E.L. Winn and W.R. Lovett in 1920. From that humble start, Winn and Lovett built a chain of “small neighborhood-type” stores, reaching a total of 65 units by the end of 1928. On Christmas Eve of that