Carrs-Safeway

Beginning

Laurence John "Larry" Carr (July 28, 1929 – May 12, 2011) moved to Anchorage, Alaska, in 1947 after graduating from high school in San Bernardino, California. After a short stint in management at the Alaska Railroad commissary, in which he hoped to make enough money to return to California and open a grocery store there, he instead became a competitor in the grocery business in Anchorage.

Carr opened his first store in a Quonset hut, located on the southern end of Gambell Street in the Eastchester (now known as Fairview) neighborhood of Anchorage, in February 1950. The location would prove to be beneficial, as Gambell Street, which became Potter Road after leaving the townsite limits and dead-ended several miles south of town at a railroad section house, soon became the northern terminus of the Seward Highway.

The name Carrs was derived from the original operating partnership of Larry Carr and his brother, Bernard Joseph Carr, Jr. They were joined by their father, Bernard Joseph "Pop" Carr, following his retirement from the Santa Fe Railroad in 1954. The senior Carr left the company in 1964 to launch a successful campaign for the Alaska House of Representatives.

Another person involved in the company during its early days was Bernard J. "Barney" Gottstein. His father, Jacob B. Gottstein, started a wholesale grocery business in Anchorage when the town was founded in 1915. Carr and Gottstein began their formal business partnership in 1960, integrating retail and wholesale grocery operations and real estate development (particularly construction of shopping centers) into one company. Carr and Gottstein were also heavily involved during the 1960s in promoting the business and political career of a recent young arrival to Alaska named Mike Gravel.

1960s–1980s

The second Carrs location and associated construction, the Aurora Village Shopping Center, was built in 1966. The Mall at Sears, an enclosed mall with an interior motif resembling a downtown sidewalk, was built the following year. Both were built along Northern Lights Boulevard, which being a section line arterial, was mostly known for illegal drag racing and associated businesses such as drive-in restaurants, as the vast majority of Anchorage's retail landscape was located downtown at the time. The construction of these two malls, combined with the Northern Lights Center constructed by Wally Hickel in 1960, started the shift in customer traffic away from downtown and towards the outlying areas of Anchorage.

These two malls began a pattern of Carrs Grocery and strip mall construction which followed for most of the next two decades. By the mid-1970s, there were Carrs stores throughout southcentral Alaska, as well as the Foodland Shopping Circle in downtown Fairbanks. Carrs operated a warehouse market called Prairie Market in the 1970s and 1980s, with two locations close to the Old Seward Highway in Anchorage.

1990s

Carrs stores were primarily located throughout the "Railbelt" area of Alaska. A subsidiary, Eagle Quality Centers, operated in numerous mid-sized and smaller Alaskan communities, both within and outside of the Railbelt. The company branched out into Southeast Alaska in the early 1990s, opening stores in Juneau and Ketchikan.

Carr and Gottstein sold their business in a leveraged buyout to two senior executives of Carr-Gottstein: John Cairns, the company's general manager, and Mark Williams, Carr-Gottstein's vice-president of operations. The price was 250–300 million dollars for 13 Carrs Quality Centers, 15 Oaken Keg liquor stores, 3 Eagle Quality Centers, Gottstein wholesale food business, freight operations, and Carr-Gottstein Properties, a real estate development firm. The company purchased the Fairbanks supermarket chain Super Valu (formerly Market Basket) in 1992.