Mace (store)

Mace is a convenience store symbol group operating in the UK and Ireland. The stores are independently owned and join the group, paying a fee for marketing and branding support and purchasing their stock from the brand owner.

United Kingdom

Great Britain

The Mace brand has had several owners in its history in Great Britain. Palmer and Harvey acquired the entire rights to Mace throughout Great Britain in 2005, finally unifying the brand under one owner. This stability has allowed the brand to recover from defections by retailers caused by frequent disruptive changes of ownership of the brand in the past.

In May 2005, P&H acquired the franchise for Mace in Scotland from Somerfield, previously operated by Aberness Foods until March 2004. Because the brand had three owners in such a short space of time, Mace retailers had experienced considerable disruption. Since the Somerfield takeover Mace "had been haemorrhaging independent retailers to other symbols since it bought Mace from Aberness". 25 stores defected to Spar during the takeover by P&H from Somerfield.

Mace

Mace may refer to:

Personal names

Fiction

Mace (weapon)

A mace is a blunt weapon, a type of club or virge that uses a heavy head on the end of a handle to deliver powerful blows. A mace typically consists of a strong, heavy, wooden or metal shaft, often reinforced with metal, featuring a head made of stone, copper, bronze, iron, or steel.

The head of a military mace can be shaped with flanges or knobs to allow greater penetration of plate armour. The length of maces can vary considerably. The maces of foot soldiers were usually quite short (two or three feet, or seventy to ninety centimetres). The maces of cavalrymen were longer and thus better suited for blows delivered from horseback. Two-handed maces could be even larger.

Maces are rarely used today for actual combat, but a large number of government bodies (for instance, the British House of Commons and the U.S. Congress), universities and other institutions have ceremonial maces and continue to display them as symbols of authority. They are often paraded in academic, parliamentary or civic rituals and processions.

MGM-13 Mace

The Martin Mace (designated as TM-76 tactical missile until 1963, then as MGM-13 for mobile-launched and CGM-13 for container-launched versions) is a tactical cruise missile developed from the MGM-1 Matador. It was replaced by the MGM-31 Pershing missile by Robert McNamara, and later in its role as a cruise missile for West Germany, by the BGM-109G Ground Launched Cruise Missile.

History

Development began in 1954 as an improved version of the MGM-1 Matador. Like the Matador, the Mace was a tactical surface-launched missile designed to destroy ground targets. It was first designed as the TM-76 and later the MGM-13.

Mace was launched from a transporter erector launcher or a hardened bunker using a solid rocket booster for initial acceleration and an Allison J33-A-41 turbojet for flight. The Goodyear Aircraft Corporation developed ATRAN (Automatic Terrain Recognition And Navigation, a radar map-matching system) in which the return from a radar scanning antenna was matched with a series of "maps" carried on board the missile which corrected the flight path if it deviated from the film map. In August 1952, Air Materiel Command initiated the mating of the Goodyear ATRAN with the MGM-1 Matador. This mating resulted in a production contract in June 1954. ATRAN was difficult to jam and was not range-limited by line-of sight, but its range was restricted by the availability of radar maps. In time, it became possible to construct radar maps from topographic maps.