Red & White / Frank & Carol's Food Center / Frank's Finer Foods / Frank & Carol's Finer Foods / Chesterfield Bi-Rite, 1316 West Boulevard, Chesterfield: July 2013













I knew that this small grocery store had been around for a while, even though I couldn't remember what it was before becoming Chesterfield Bi-Rite. Regarding this most recent grocery incarnation, the Bi-Rite appears to have closed by July of 2013. Their "unofficial" Facebook page shows regular postings until the middle of January of 2013. Further online research quickly led me to the former store manager's LinkedIn profile, which shows his tenure at Chesterfield Bi-Rite ending in July of 2013.

Looking the street address up online revealed that the previous grocery store to occupy this building was Frank & Carol's Finer Foods. Other names that showed up for the same business were Frank & Carol's Food Center and Frank's Finer Foods; however, the official name seems to be Frank & Carol's Finer Foods because that name is listed in the obituaries of the owners of this former business, Mr. and Mrs. Frank and Carol DeMiere. According to both obituaries, Frank and Carol moved to Chesterfield from Illinois to open this store back in 1985 and ran it successfully until 2010, when they decided to retire.

That means Chesterfield Bi-Rite was only around for less than three years, since it started in 2010 shortly after the retirement of the previous owners. The store has now sat (almost) empty for twice as long as the Bi-Rite's existence. That also means those canned drinks and boxes of Kix cereal still sitting on the shelves are at least six years old. I'm sure the drinks are flat now, but I wonder if the Kix is stale. And would you really want to eat cereal that old (or probably older), even if it tasted fresh?

The closing of this grocery store leaves Piggly Wiggly as the only one in town, although I imagine most people in Chesterfield go to Walmart in Cheraw, which likely played some part in Chesterfield Bi-Rite going out of business, as it did with BI-LO and Food Lion. Speaking of BI-LO, I was going to do a post on it a few weeks ago, likely when I did the post on Sonny's, but I lost the pictures I took when my camera's memory card stopped working. Eventually, I will get back out there, but there are some other buildings/former businesses I want to get to this weekend because it appears they will be demolished soon; one of those is also a former grocery store. Huh, it's like those don't last long around here at all anymore...

UPDATE: Per Frank's comment, I have added Red & White to the list of businesses that were at this location in the past.


Comments

By: Frank (Mon Oct 14 15:36:23 EDT 2019)
For decades this was the Red and White owned by Bryan Lisenby.

By: Frank (Mon Oct 14 15:36:30 EDT 2019)
For decades this was the Red and White owned by Bryan Lisenby.

By: sean (Wed Oct 16 16:30:00 EDT 2019)
@Frank Thanks for checking in. So that was before the store was owned by Frank and Carol? I'll add that to the post.