The Market Report

A Tale of Two Four! Supermarkets Mount Vernon, NY Part IV: Western Beef No one quite knows what to make of Western Beef. Is it a discount store? No. Is it an ethnic store? No. Is it a specialty store? No. Is it a regular supermarket? No. The Western Beef is closer to the Food Bazaar than either of the other two. The interior is pretty unremarkable, save for Western Beef's trademark walk-in refrigerator room, which is very nice in the summer but was not great in February! Well, that wraps up not only our Mount Vernon supermarket tour, but also our coverage of the Rockland/Westchester area for now! We're headed back to the Northern New Jersey region on Monday for another store tour, so stay tuned!

A Tale of Two Four! Supermarkets Mount Vernon, NY Part III: Food Bazaar Remember when the only chain willing to go into low-income urban neighborhoods was Pathmark? The Mount Vernon, NY Pathmark is a prime example of that. Opened in the 1990s, the store's advantage over the nearby competition was size. At over 60,000 square feet, the store is enormous for the area. The Western Beef and Foodtown are probably more in the 30-40,000 square foot range and C-Town is more like 15,000 square feet. Pathmark closed around 2012, with Food Bazaar opening soon after. After the store was opened, Food Bazaar began an extensive remodel -- more on that later. The approach is certainly impressive, at least the way I came in. Mount Vernon is a low-income, urban area and Third Street, one of the main roads through town, is very narrow and busy. At the corner of Third Avenue, it opens up a little bit to the right. You can see the Food Bazaar sign. When you make a right at the traffi

Welcome to NJ Supermarkets'... 100th Post!  Thanks to all the readers who make this worthwhile! Now for today's content... A Tale of Two Four! Supermarkets Mount Vernon, NY Part II: CTown Looks like this one didn't make it. Although the CTown of Mount Vernon is still listed on the CTown website, it's marked as Permanently Closed on both Google Maps and Yelp. It was located right around the corner from the Foodtown... Update: It's no longer marked as closed on Google Maps, but no circular on CTown's website. Anyone have any info? Second Update (9/27): This has been converted to a La Placita Foodmarket, still under the Krasdale Foods umbrella.

A Tale of Two Four! Supermarkets Mount Vernon, NY Part I: Foodtown The Mount Vernon, NY Foodtown is a 1960s (I believe) Waldbaums that closed sometime in the 1990s or very early 2000s. It opened soon after as a Foodtown owned by the same owners as the Foodtown of Riverdale in the Bronx. Let's begin with a review of the whole area... The Western Beef is kind of outside of the central area where the others are. ( UPDATE : I realize the C-Town and Foodtown locations are off. They're a few blocks too far to the right. They are labeled correctly below.) Today we're going to look at the Foodtown. The Foodtown has its own small parking lot, which can be quite difficult to navigate if it's full (which it was when I visited on a Saturday evening). The Foodtown was extensively renovated around 2012. Before, the store was pretty depressing, at least from the outside.  The renovation brought some much-needed freshness to the area... All 3-D map and stre