As the numbers of Italians in the city grew, so did the number of Italian owned grocery stores. From only six in 1880, their number had increased to over 600 by 1928. Italian neighborhood grocers carried a wide range of products which families used every day. Yet they differed from the stores of other ethnics, according to Sophonisba Breckinridge, in the lack of canned goods available and the absence of fresh meats. Breckinridge found the neighborhood green grocer, offering fresh fruits and vegetables as well as other staples in the Italian diet, to be the most prevalent store in the Italian areas. In one neighborhood, she noted, almost all the consumed food came from the neighborhood green grocery. Items such as salad greens were found in more variety in one store than in many American markets. In addition, "Every store has a large case of different varieties of Italian cheese and the variety of macaroni, spaghetti, and noodles is amazing to an American." The Auriemma Grocery on the Near West Side, kept on the counter chunks of Provolone or Romano, cut from great cheese wheels, and huge cans of anchovies. [86]

Like peddlers, neighborhood stores offered advantages to consumers. Most important, of course, was the ability to communicate fluently with their customers. Learning to speak English was a difficult matter for adults, and for women, who spent much of their time within their own ethnic neighborhoods, it posed an even greater problem. As with peddlers, the ability to bargain and to specify exactly what was needed saved both time and money. Neighborhood stores sold many of their goods unpackaged, making it easy to buy in the small amounts daily shoppers needed. Credit, not cash, was the norm in neighborhood stores and the ability to pay off bills in weekly installments towards the "book" was vital when work was irregular but mouths still had to be fed. Finally, neighborhood stores sold the goods that their immediate neighbors wanted.

In a survey of 90 Chicago immigrant women published in 1921, Breckinridge found that 72 of the women reported shopping for all of their needs in neighborhood stores, two of the women had their own stores, and only 16 shopped elsewhere. The National Tea Company, The Great Atlantic and Pacific, and the Consumers Sanitary Coffee and Butter Stores had all begun to open chain stores in Chicago by 1920. The policy of the National Tea Company, which added grocery items to their stock during the teens, was to place new stores in German and Scandinavian neighborhoods on the North Side, in the middle class neighborhoods of the South Side, and in the suburbs. These chain stores avoided the city's ethnic enclaves of Italians, Poles, and Jews, however, because of the language barriers between employees and customers and the need to stock ethnic specialty items. [87]

Although the opening of a grocery store required the labor of more than one person, the ability to pay rent for a storefront location, and a greater investment in stock, none of these needs were insurmountable. Most businesses were small, family managed and staffed operations with informal bookkeeping methods and low overhead. Using ground floor flats as both retail space and living space for the family lessened the rental expense. Many families lived in the small backrooms of stores. Nor was much needed in the way of special facilities. Catholic settlement worker Mary Amberg described one grocery on the Near West Side located in the basement of the old Bremner mansion on Loomis Street: "The window was piled high with dried fish and squid, dried peppers, Italian cheeses and salami that made part of the window seem like a garden of gourds." Above, in the former library were stabled a goat and two kids. Grocery stores in such casual locations occasionally carried their own problems. The Lower North Community Council reported in their rating of homes in the Sicilian neighborhood near the Eli Bates settlement house, "Those bearing the 'Very Good' were for the most part homes of shop-keepers, whom we may suppose had added opportunity or incentive to keep clean, on the contrary, however, two grocery stores were found very dirty and fly infested." [89]

Family living space was cramped and hours of work were long and sometimes hard. A description of work in an American store gives an idea of the how physical retailing could be when almost all items arrived in bulk.

In the early 1930s, we worked in stores with very little heat and no air conditioning. Potatoes came in 100 pound bags and had to be packaged. We candled our own eggs, sliced bacon with a hand slicer. Chickens and turkeys came with the entrails in and thus stores had to clean out the guts--very unsanitary. Molasses came in barrels. Iceberg lettuce and carrots came in large crates packed with ice.

In the 1890s, a member of the Retail Clerks National Protective Association maintained that clerks worked from six in the morning until ten o'clock or later and on Sundays until noon with no holidays. They sometimes never left the shop, carrying their dinners with them and sleeping on counter tops at night. For small stores, income was seldom very high. One Italian family of seven living in two rooms, survived on the proceeds of the eight feet of space allocated to the small vegetable stand they ran within their home. Their income averaged about six dollars a week. [90]

For owners, however, the grocery business could have some distinct advantages. Like peddling, owners were their own bosses, but in a market for which there was a year-round demand. Shopkeepers were respected members of the community. For example, Richard Alghini, proprietor of the Alghini store on the Near West Side went to work with a suit, a fresh flower in his lapel and a fedora hat rakishly tilted to the right. His very attire set him apart from his working class neighbors. [91]

At least one Italian expanded his family-run grocery to become a recognized name throughout the city. Dominick DiMatteo immigrated to Chicago in 1909 from Monreale, Sicily. He packed fruits and vegetables at the South Water Street Market and worked as a water boy for a railway crew in Minnesota before going into partnership (at the age of 24) in a grocery store at Monticello and Grand Avenue. In 1925 he bought bought a small store at Ohio and Avers and by 1934 had purchased a second store for his son. The small stores sold Italian specialty foods in bulk from barrels and bins and were quiet enough for their proprietor to play checkers in between customers. Today, The Dominick's Company owns 101 stores according to its current company literature, located in 70 communities in the Chicago area. [92]