Cornering The Market: Neighborhood Stores In Tracy

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article is slightly off-topic. There is little, if anything, about trains in this article.

While driving around Tracy, in these days of sprawling supermarkets – Safeway, Raleys, Save-Mart among them – you may not notice the numerous corner markets that dot our town.

Most of these corner markets, several of which aren’t actually on a corner, per se, date back several decades, to a time before the large supermarkets offered one-stop convenience for everything your family needs.

Back in those early days, you’d go to the butcher shop for your meat, the bakery for your daily bread, the dairy for your milk – and, if you needed anything else, you walk or drive over to the neighborhood store for those odds and ends.

Many of those convenient small markets of the past are gone now, but you may recognize a handful of them that I have spotted around town lately.