5 Bashas’ Things Longtime Arizonans Remember From Before the Valley Boomed

Bashas’ early customers bought groceries on credit, with every sale written in a ledger.

Longtime Arizonans remember the chain from when Chandler was a small cotton town.

Here are the Bashas’ things longtime Arizonans remember from before the Valley boomed.

1. A Seven-Place Sale Ad

Bashas’ ran a grocery ad in the June 21, 1946, issue of the Coolidge Examiner.

It listed seven places under the Bashas’ name, from Coolidge and Eloy to Chandler, Mesa and Phoenix.

Bashas’ says its first store outside Chandler opened in downtown Mesa in 1936, one of the places that 1946 ad lists.

If you picture Bashas’ as a one-town store, the ad shows its name already reaching from Coolidge to Phoenix.

2. The Cotton-Ranch Grocery

Bashas’ says it began in 1932, when brothers Ike and Eddie Basha opened its first grocery store.

The Chandler Museum says that store was meant to feed the workers on a cotton ranch south of downtown Chandler, a ranch Goodyear Tire had formerly run.

The store was set up to supply those workers.

Goodyear Tire had leased 8,000 acres south of town, and by 1950 Chandler’s population had reached 3,800, according to the city.

The museum calls the grocery an immediate success, and it sat on what is now Basha Road, which you can find in the Ocotillo neighborhood.

Your picture of a Bashas’ may start with a supermarket, but this one began as a grocery for a cotton crew.

3. Country-Store Shelves

Bashas' first grocery sold more than food, according to a company history entry.

The store stocked blankets and gasoline along with groceries.

It stocked axes too.

You could buy an axe and your groceries in the same stop.

That country-store format lasted about two decades, the entry says.

The entry adds that its focus on rural customers went beyond what the brothers' parents had run.

4. Credit by Ledger

Bashas' early customers bought on credit, with each sale written in a ledger, according to The Shelby Report's 2022 anniversary story.

If you've ever run a tab, you know the idea.

Bashas' also says early customers included Native American traders, who brought in beef and mesquite wood.

The same story says the store also sold to the workers who were working in the area.

5. The First Supermarket

A photo caption in The Shelby Report's 2022 anniversary story says Ike and Eddie Basha Sr. held the grand opening of their first supermarket in 1956.

The company-history entry says the brothers converted their stores to supermarkets gradually through the 1950s.

The format changed.

That entry says the change positioned the chain for the postwar boom.

If you shop a Bashas' today, you're shopping a descendant of that supermarket era.

The Family Store Before the Grocery

The Basha family ran a dry-goods store in downtown Chandler before the grocery.

Najeeb and Najeeby Basha opened it on Boston Street in downtown Chandler in 1920, a Chandler Museum entry says.

The store stood on the south side of Boston Street, just west of Washington Street.

Chandler had more than 1,000 residents by 1920.

The company-history entry says the founders' mother, Najeeby Basha, presided as family matriarch over the relatives who ran the first and later stores.

One sister acted as buyer and another handled administration.

The family added food to its shelves after noticing a grocery across the street doing more business.

Najeeb Basha died in 1932, the year Bashas' dates its first grocery store.

The Boom That Followed

Bashas' supermarket years overlapped with a growth spurt, since the Census Bureau counted 749,587 Arizona residents in 1950 and 1,302,161 in 1960.

If you lived in Arizona in 1960, you were one of those 1,302,161 people.

Chandler, where the chain began, reached 30,000 residents by 1980.

Arizona Highways, drawing on a company history, says the chain grew from seven stores to 16 in the 1960s.

The Shelby Report also puts the chain at 16 stores when Eddie Basha Jr. took over in 1968, while the company-history entry says 17.

Sources disagree by one store.

Bashas' says Eddie Basha Jr. opened stores in Sedona, Prescott and Flagstaff to balance seasonal sales.

Bashas' Today

Raley's completed its purchase of Bashas' in December 2021.

Bashas' opened a Diné store in Shiprock, New Mexico, on the Navajo Nation in July 2021, The Shelby Report says.

If you want more of the family story, the Chandler Museum opened an exhibit called "Being Eddie Basha" in March 2026, planned to run 16 months.