Meijer: the Grand Rapids store that invented one-stop shopping

If you’ve shopped at a Meijer, you’ve used a West Michigan invention. The store started in 1934, when Hendrik Meijer — a Dutch immigrant and barber in Greenville, Michigan — opened a little grocery during the Great Depression with help from his 14-year-old son, Fred. The big idea came in 1962, when the Meijers opened a store in Grand Rapids called “Thrifty Acres” that put a full grocery store and a department store under one roof, with a single set of checkouts. People said it would never work. Instead, it’s widely considered the first “supercenter” in America — the one-stop-shopping idea that even Walmart would follow years later. Meijer is still a family-owned company, headquartered in Walker, just outside Grand Rapids, with more than 500 stores across six Midwestern states. Fred Meijer was famously down-to-earth (he drove an old car and asked people to just call him “Fred”), and he and his wife, Lena, gave Grand Rapids one of its treasures: the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park. Opened in 1995, it’s now one of the most-visited attractions in Michigan — 158 acres with a five-story tropical greenhouse, an 8-acre Japanese garden, a famous giant bronze horse based on a design Leonardo da Vinci never finished, and a beloved spring butterfly show.

You can visit: Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park is at 1000 East Beltline Avenue NE in Grand Rapids — meijergardens.org.