Antique 1935 Mity Fine Broom Label 🧹 Art Deco Swan NROG Chicago Grocers Advertising - NOS Litho Paper Ephemera

Mity Fine Broom Label 🦢 1935, National Retailer-Owned Grocers of Chicago

Size: 6 1/4" x 3 1/2"

A white swan gliding across the top, MITY FINE in big black letters, BROOM in white on a navy band, and yellow sunburst rays, each edged in a thin red line, fanning out behind it all. At the bottom, in a little white panel: N.R.O.G. - NATIONAL RETAILER-OWNED GROCERS, INC. - DISTRIBUTORS - General Offices - CHICAGO, ILL. - and the tiny line COPYRIGHT 1935. Never used, back plain. I have a stack, so you'll get one like the one shown.

🛒 Grocers Who Owned Their Own Wholesaler

That company name tells the story. In the '20s and '30s the big chain stores were squeezing the corner grocer. Around Chicago, National Tea, A&P and Kroger bought up hundreds of stores through the 1920s, and by 1933 the chains had only about one grocery in five but took in some 60 percent of the sales. The shopkeepers started the Associated Food Dealers of Greater Chicago in 1936 to lobby for them and teach the business side of things, but mostly Chicago's independents fought back by banding together - cooperatives they owned themselves, and voluntary chains with the big wholesalers - buying in bulk like a chain and putting their own house brands on the shelf. The best known of them all, IGA - the Independent Grocers Alliance - got its start in 1926. A Chicago accountant named J. Frank Grimes dreamed it up and signed up his first stores that May in Poughkeepsie, New York and Sharon, Connecticut, and IGA keeps its headquarters in Chicago today. National Retailer-Owned Grocers was one of those outfits, owned by the very stores it supplied, and Mity Fine was one of its brands. A shopper buying a broom at the neighborhood grocery in 1935 got this swan on the handle.

And N.R.O.G. was no small-time outfit. When a grocers' cooperative from Madison, Wisconsin - the one known today as Certco - joined the National Retailer-Owned Grocers affiliation in 1937, the group counted more than 22,000 independent retailers, and by Certco's own account it was the largest buyer of food in America. The "National" was earned, too. The FDA's court notices from the 1940s have N.R.O.G. shipping canned string beans out of Baltimore in 1941 under the Shurfine name, and canned fruit cocktail from Oakland, California to Omaha in 1945. Shurfine on the beans, Mity Fine on the brooms.

They had a whole line of these broom labels - Viking is another one I carry, with the same N.R.O.G. Chicago panel and the same 1935 copyright.

🧹 Why So Fancy for a Broom?

Because a broom leaning in a barrel by the door had to sell itself. Sunburst rays, a swan, a name like Mity Fine - in the middle of the Depression, that was a lot of style for a nickel's worth of label. It looks wonderful framed in a laundry room or a kitchen.

🌾 Broom Country

The broom trade was having a hard Depression of its own. The country had 1,039 broom factories at the 1919 peak, and by 1939 it was down to 320 - so a 1935 broom needed all the help a good-looking label could give it. Corn brooms are tied from broomcorn, a sorghum grown for its long, stiff brush. Ben Franklin gets the credit for bringing it to America, and the old story has him picking a single seed off an imported whisk broom and planting it. Illinois grew more broomcorn than any other state back in the 1860s, and Arcola, down in Douglas County, holds a Broom Corn Festival the weekend after Labor Day for its years as a broomcorn center in the late 1800s. Libman, a broom maker that started out in Chicago in 1896 and is still family-owned, makes its brooms in Arcola now.