Quinnsworth and Crazy Prices

supereurope

Hello there

Two questions on the long-defunct Quinnsworth and Crazy Prices chains if anyone might know the answers?

1. When did Crazy Prices arrive in ROI? The brand was around in NI for a good few years before making its way south (which it did after Quinnsworth owners ABF bought Crazy Prices owner Stewarts in 1982), but I don't know when the first Crazy Prices store opened in the Republic. I assume it was a rebranded Quinnsworth store as opposed to a new-build.
2. When did the Quinnsworth and Crazy Prices names actually vanish from Irish streets and shopping centres? I know Tesco bought the chain in 1997 and a few months later started a rebranding process, but when did the sign over the last Quinnsworth store change to Tesco? I seem to recall there were still a few Quinnsworths around in 2000/2001. I was a student in Cork at the time and the store in Wilton was a Quinnsworth for a long time after the merger, and technically never actually rebranded - instead, it was knocked, rebuilt and reopened as Tesco in the early 2000s.

Thanks for any help!

Glaceon

The Ballyfermot store was rebranded from Quinnsworth to Crazy Prices in the early 90s, I'd say maybe 1991/92 or so. I doubt it was the first though.

Pawwed Rig

I thought it was a lot earlier than that. I would have said mid to late 80s.

L1011

Ballymun and Dundrum stores are listed in Thoms index in 1986 as Crazy Prices. The Ballymun was a rebrand anyway.

Dundrum one is listed as "The Old Railway Market, Main Street" if that clarifies which of the various sites that Power Supermarkets had in Dundrum.

Annoyingly, the index just lists Quinnsworth as Stillorgan SC "and branches", so I'd have to check every street address manually!

gipi

My recollection is that the Crazy Prices at Hanlon's Corner had previously been a H Williams supermarket. I shopped there in the mid 80s.

supereurope

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120913352#Comment_120913352

Thanks - this confirms that the first two Crazy Prices in ROI were Dundrum (Sandyford Rd) and Ballymun. 

I was in the local library the other day and searched the newspaper archives for a possible answer. I didn’t find one, but the first mention of Crazy Prices in Dundrum in any newspaper came in the Irish Times of Friday 29 August 1984, in one of “mystery shopped” columns. So the store was a Crazy Prices by the late summer of 1984, and while I still don’t know when it opened exactly, it can only have been between October 1982 (when ABF bought Crazy Prices in NI) and August 1984.

As I was trawling through the archives, I dug back a bit more on the history of the site of Crazy Prices Dundrum. It first opened as a H Williams supermarket in December 1968, opened by TV chef Monica Sheridan. In the summer of 1982, H Williams sold three stores to Quinnsworth, Dundrum was one of them. The store was converted to a Quinnsworth immediately, so there were two large Quinnsworth stores close to each other (Sandyford Rd and the old Dundrum Shopping Centre.) Later in 1982, Quinnsworth opened another store nearby, this time in Balally, but after just a few months, it sold that store to H Williams.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120913505#Comment_120913505

I don’t know if there was ever a Crazy Prices at Hanlon’s Corner, but the supermarket in the Park Shopping Centre has had many names in its lifetime. Opened in 1985 as a Tesco, it became a H Williams when Tesco left Ireland in 1986. When H Williams failed in 1987, it became a Quinnsworth, before going back to Tesco when they returned to Ireland in 1997. 

The period from 1977 to 1997 were a pretty interesting time for Irish supermarkets with takeovers, new arrivals, withdrawals, collapses and stores changing hands between supermarkets. It’s possible a supermarket that opened as a 3 Guys (Gubay’s) in the late 1970s could have become a Tesco, a H Williams, a Giant, a Quinnsworth and then a Tesco again over the course of 20 years.