Clover (store)
discount chain of 26 stores operated by Strawbridge & Clothier in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware
Clover was a discount chain of 26 stores operated by Strawbridge & Clothier in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Clover stores averaged 80,000 sq ft (7,400 m2), but the first five stores it opened ran about 95,000 sq ft (8,800 m2) to 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2).
History
The first Clover store opened in 1971 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. The management of Strawbridge & Clothier based their Clover store format on Dayton Hudson's Target store chain and Federated's Gold Circle Discount store. The name was taken from S&C's periodic sale days, Clover Days. The similarities to Target were evident throughout the life of Clover. The earliest locations included a food store (Clovermarket) adjacent to the main store. S&C did not operate the food stores for long and they were converted to Acme or P.L.U.S. (an A&P no-frills format).
In 1978, Strawbridge & Clothier partnered with the Rouse Company developing two mini-malls next to their Cinnaminson and Center Square stores, that were called Clover Square. These had a mixture of national and regional chains and independent stores.
“Clover (store)” enters the record as discount chain of 26 stores operated by Strawbridge & Clothier in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Clover, store and discount can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Clover (store)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Clover, store and discount provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5135866. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971 and 1978.
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This entry incorporates text from “Clover (store)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.