Supermarket

William Jordan's path to affordable produce takes him on three city buses. At 46, Jordan is hindered by high blood pressure, asthma, and permanent damage to his right knee, but he makes the journey - on crutches, despite the heat, every Thursday afternoon - to stretch his SNAP (food stamp) dollars in an experimental program with an appropriate acronym: LIFE. This Local Initiative for Food Education at Greensgrow Farm in Kensington, now in its second summer, enables members to stretch their SNAP dollars while cultivating their ability to budget, plan, shop, and prepare meals.

Police are searching for two men in connection with a violent armed robbery last week at a North Philadelphia supermarket. Employees of the My City supermarket at 1900 Susquehanna Ave. were opening the store at 7 a.m. Wednesday when two men entered. One pulled a gun and pistol-whipped two male workers, police said. The bandits took $300 and grabbed a 12-gauge Mossberg pump-action shotgun before running away, police said. Police identified the gunman as Wesley Clark, 20, who is known to frequent the 2100 block of North 20th Street.

Nothing had moved the needle off the stalled opening of a supermarket for Northern Liberties. Not months of insistent court filings. Not $30 million poured into a new shopping center built just for a Pathmark. Not the neighborhood's explosive growth. Not a powerful retail-clerks-union leader helping out. Corporate parent A&P's December bankruptcy filing held hostage the neighborhood's hopes for that Pathmark, thwarting the desire for something ubiquitous in the suburbs: a place nearby to buy groceries.

Giant Food Stores, which has expanded fiercely with 47 locations across Southeastern Pennsylvania in recent years to become one of the most popular supermarket chains in the region, has broken the city barrier. The grocer will open its first Philadelphia store July 20 at the site of the decommissioned Penn Fruit bakery and commercial food-storage facility in the 2500 block of Grant Avenue near Roosevelt Boulevard in the Northeast. The 74,000-square-foot Giant is part of a 156,000-square-foot retail redevelopment project that came to fruition during the last two years despite opposition from the region's top grocery labor union - and despite ample competition in the area.

CHICAGO - Some of the 2,500 people who came to hear Jill Cataldo talk about coupons started lining up four hours before she took the stage at the performing arts center in Charleston, S.C., in March. Cataldo's sold-out speech was touted as the largest event of its kind ever held in the United States. This crowd was big, but Cataldo, an entrepreneur and mother of three from the far northwest suburb of Huntley, is used to the attention. She has secrets to share that are just right for this penny-pinching era: how to use those little clips of paper to save a family thousands of dollars a year at the supermarket.

George Zallie Sr., 84, of Voorhees, owner and founder of Zallie Supermarkets Inc. in South Jersey, died Saturday, June 18. Mr. Zallie's interests extended beyond retailing. A website for Jefferson Medical College states that the George Zallie and Family Laboratory for Cardiovascular Gene Therapy is "focused on making gene therapy for congestive heart failure a clinical reality. " A spokeswoman for Wakefern Food Corp., in Keasbey, N.J., stated in a news release that "in 1980, the Zallie family joined Wakefern Food Corp.," a retailer-owned cooperative whose members operate supermarkets under the ShopRite banner.

A bankruptcy judge on Wednesday denied a Philadelphia developer's request to force A&P, the owner of an unopened Northern Liberties Pathmark, to abandon its stalled lease so that a new supermarket tenant could be secured, the company said. The ruling by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert D. Drain in the Southern District of New York means the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. has until July 10 to decide what to do with its unopened new store near Second Street and Girard Avenue, A&P spokesman Eric Andrus said.

One day in the late 1990s, DyAnne DiSalvo-Ryan walked into John's Friendly Market in Haddon Heights and found the setting for a children's story. "She was looking for a family-owned store to write her book about," said Josephine Doto, a daughter of store owner John C. Johnson. In 2000, Harper Collins published Grandpa's Corner Store , a novel written and illustrated by DiSalvo-Ryan. On Tuesday, May 10, Mr. Johnson, 91, of Haddon Heights, who had owned the market since 1976, died of liver failure at home.

The Northern Liberties developer behind a planned Pathmark supermarket has asked a bankruptcy judge to clear the way for a different supermarket to open, if need be, at the old Schmidt's Brewery, where Pathmark holds a lease but has not yet opened a store. "I petitioned the courts to have them do that a month ago," Bart Blatstein said Wednesday of his efforts to enforce or dissolve his lease with Pathmark, whose parent company, A&P, has been in bankruptcy since December. "Leave," Blatstein said.