St. Patrick’s Day Grocery Ads – March 1970

Today’s grocery store circulars that come with your mail or newspaper are beautifully designed, and crammed with full-color photographs of the featured sale items. There’s very little left to the imagination as to what's being advertised (except that some of the photos are only slightly larger than a postage stamp).

Decades ago, however, most supermarkets ran black and white ads in the newspaper to advertise their sale items, usually on a specific day of the week. And the ads relied on illustrations and listed the products that were on sale.

Often the ads featured seasonal decorations, such as these ads with a St. Patrick’s Day theme. They both ran in the Lorain Journal in March 1970.

Here’s one for the well-remembered Pick-n-Pay, which ran on March 11, 1970. Although there’s some nice clip art of a leprechaun, the Clydesdale Horses are the main attraction since they were going to appear in the parade that year. (I’m assuming it was a Budweiser tie-in, although there’s not a mention in the ad of the King of Beers.)

On that same day, Fisher Fazio ran their own ad in the Journal, also featuring a leprechaun – smoking yet! Here’s the ad header.

Strangely enough, the big meat specials were ham and pork – hardly suitable for the day honoring the sons of Erin!

Anyway, here’s hoping you have a great St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow.

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For more fun, you can revisit these previous St. Patrick’s Day posts, as well as this one about corned beef.