I pulled up to the stop sign at Calvary and Woodland in the heart of Woodland yesterday, looked ahead, and… it’s gone!
The blast-from-the-past, decades-old Piggly Wiggly facade, cherished by… well, at least me, and featured in a PDD banner of yore, is no more! See for yourself:
Every time I drove past the store I had thought, “I should stop and take some photos before it’s gone” – and I don’t think I ever did. But someone else did… so here is what it used to look like. (is that old PDD banner still around somewhere?)
For now, the lone pig sign by the road is still there:
I made an informal call to the store last night, and the clerk who answered said the store is not closing, but is undergoing a remodeling. He said he thought – stress, thought – that the Piggly Wiggly name was going to change as part of the work.
The store is owned by Miners, the Super One company; a history on their Web site says they opened the Woodland Piggly Wiggly in 1965… and I’d guess the building hasn’t changed much since then. The Woodland store is the only Piggly Wiggly left in the company – and apparently the only one left in Minnesota.
Perhaps they’ll make it a Super One, too; it would make sense from a business standpoint. Does anyone out there know more? Maybe I’ll give the company HQ a call this week.
In addition to the exterior, the interior of the store is / was a throwback, too… a sort of maze-like layout where you are channeled around two sides of the store in a single passageway before you can get to the rest of the aisles. A throwback… but I guess not very practical by today’s store standards.
It’s cool to see the owners make a commitment to remodeling the store at a time when so many neighborhood grocery stores have closed. But I guess every good thing comes at a price. So if the name is, in fact, gone from Duluth… RIP Piggly Wiggly.
