The Market Report

Going about five blocks south of Met Foods for the first Snapshot of this group. Similar to the little  International Supermarket  in Elizabeth is this tiny Selectos Supermarket right in the main business corridor of northern West New York (WNY), NJ. This one is looking pretty good with a real brick facade, new sign and awning, and bright colors in the windows. I did not go inside, but it's a very small 2-3 aisle store that used to operate as La Marqueta Meat & Produce, and before that El Colmadon Grocery. I don't know if any ownership changed there.

I've already talked about how the furthest-behind supermarket group around here is Metropolitan City Foods, a division of Associated Supermarket Group that runs Met Foods and Pioneer Supermarkets stores. I won't go into that too much here, but this store is typical of an outdated MCF location. It's the farthest north on our tour and the only one in tiny Guttenberg. On Bergenline Ave between 68th and 69th Streets, the nicest thing about this supermarket is its awning. Not sure about the spelling of "pinacle". If they mean the highest point, then it should be "pinnacle". I doubt it's someone's name, but I could be wrong. It's a surprisingly non-Hispanic store in this very Hispanic neighborhood. The hot food bar is more of the meatloaf and mac & cheese persuasion than arroz con pollo and carne asada. You walk in on the left side to the dairy aisle, strangely enough, and the back wall contains hot food, deli, meat, and seafood. Frozen

February's Former Supermarket of the Month is this store in Livingston, NJ. It was built as a Grand Union but bought by Pathmark in the 2001 bankruptcy. Pathmark closed in 2010 and The Fresh Market opened up in the space in 2014 (?). It closed in 2017. Other supermarket operators have not been interested in the space because of its out-of-the-way location and the fact that no fewer than three different major chains closed here. The Fresh Market took up a roughly 25,000-square-foot space in the right half of the former Pathmark. This entire strip, despite the recent renovations, has had difficulty in finding and keeping tenants. Although one supermarket was rumored to be considering the space, there has been no action on that.

Starting on Monday... Last August, I took a full day to walk around Union City and West New York, NJ (and one stop in tiny Guttenberg), in Hudson County just north of Jersey City. That area is practically overflowing with corner stores, bodegas, super carnicerias, neighborhood markets, and supermarkets. Bergenline Avenue, especially in West New York, is a very pleasant*, vibrant pedestrian-based business district. We're going to take an in-depth look at 20 stores in those two cities over the course of the next month or so. There will be eleven full Store Tours and the remaining nine will be either Snapshots or Look Inside posts. Here's a look at what you can expect over the coming weeks. *Er...it's pleasant when it's not 95 degrees out. Like it was on the day I chose to do a walking  tour of these 20 stores. Definitely click on the picture to zoom in. We'll be touring them approximately from top to bottom (not quite north to south, more like northeast to s

Few grocery chains scream "on their way out" like Met Foods does. Most Met stores are outdated, cramped, and haphazardly run. However, this Food Connection Supermarket on Staten Island, which does business as a Met Foods with ASG, was a very pleasant surprise. It's an old-fashioned grocery store with a storefront facing the main street, Victory Blvd, and parking and the main entrance in the back. This is the back entrance, which directs shoppers into the produce aisle, along the back of the store. Surprisingly, this tiny store even had a large seafood department, organic produce, fresh bread from local bakeries, and a large gourmet deli. Food Connection owns both of the Met Foodmarkets on Staten Island.

One of the few remaining, largely unaltered Marina Safeways in the country is in the unlikely location of Springfield, NJ, just across the street from the former A&Ps we saw on Friday. It's owned and operated by Village Super Market, which is also based in Springfield. The storefront is completely glass, save for expansions to the two sides. The produce/grand aisle with deli, a tiny bakery, and seafood is to the right, and the pharmacy (formerly a liquor store) is on the left side. The worst thing about this store is its parking lot, which is not nearly big enough for the traffic that comes through this store. Old sign in the corner of the lot. Hard to tell exactly what it says. Great sky. These last two pictures were taken from the parking lot across the street.

This is a very new store that only opened in May of 2017 and looks really nice: Home Fresh Market in Linden, NJ. Located at 355 St Georges Ave, it sells a selection of fresh produce and has a small deli. Google Maps street view. Home Fresh posted the above photo on Google Maps as well. Look at that eggplant!

Some retailers are in such a good location that when they outgrow their building, they decide to move elsewhere within the same mall. That's clearly the case with A&P here in Millburn, NJ. After opening a Centennial-styled store in the 1950s at one end of the shopping mall, A&P later decided to move to the other end in the 1970s. The older store is now a Harmon Discount drugstore: You really can't miss that A&P facade. The left side of the store has been turned into a Panera restaurant. A shopping mall with offices on the second floor extends out of the side of the old A&P building, with a facade that replicates the A&P building style. Here we're looking from the older A&P, in the foreground, towards the newer one in the background. The 1970s building, with a new facade, has become a CanDo Fitness Center. You can see the store would have originally had a Centennial-like facade, but later tenants added the new facade in front.

We saw the Super Foodtown of Lake Hiawatha in Parsippany, NJ over a year ago, a converted Grand Union that closed in the 2001 bankruptcy and was taken over by the LaRacca brothers, who had a small chain of stores under the Foodtown group. Today it's their only store. However, that Grand Union was likely renovated and expanded to coincide with the closing of their other store in Parsippany, this location on Littleton Rd. Today the building has been divided among several smaller stores, including Dunkin' Donuts, Subzi Mandi (an Indian grocery store), Chand Palace, and Pearl Banquet Hall. Subzi Mandi always has a random assortment of shopping carts, many retired from the nearby ShopRite.

Many supermarkets reuse old carts from other stores. Some stores have their own fleet of ancient carts. This cart, from between 1976 and 2002 (but likely the earlier end of that), was spotted at the Elizabeth, NJ ShopRite . I don't think Village ShopRite has used those coin-deposit carts in my lifetime! This store also had at least one of these carts...

For once, a supermarket commercial that's pretty good!

When you own a supermarket, the first impression of the store that your customers -- and prospective customers -- get is the outside, right? So the outside should draw customers in, in one way or another. It should never leave your customers wondering what the heck your store's name is. This photo was taken in November 2016 at the America's Food Basket (formerly known as Compare Foods) in Providence, RI. Click here for a full tour.

These young whippersnappers today... OK, not like that. But I did come across a reminder of A&P in my grandmother's house... Hmm. Somehow the idea of buying "small garbage" isn't overly appealing to me. Maybe it's just me. Of course, Greenway products are now available at Foodtown and other Allegiance affiliates. But they're not the original ones distributed by OnPoint, Inc at 1 Paragon Dr in Montvale, NJ!

A while ago we saw the fascinating Twin City Supermarket in Elizabeth, NJ. As I mentioned, the group also owns other stores: Twin City Supermarket in Plainfield, NJ Twin City Supermarket in Newark, NJ Pueblo Supermarket in Newark, NJ Aquí Market at Journal Square, Jersey City, NJ Aquí Market at Twin City Plaza, Jersey City, NJ Aquí Market in Bridgewater, NJ Aquí Market in Califon, NJ And this store, Superfood Fresh Market in Middlesex, NJ. This store has an interesting history. The store was opened as a WT Grant in the 1950s, joining an A&P at the other end of the mall. A&P closed in 2001 and was converted to a Food Basics, which closed in 2006. That space is now divided between Dollar Tree and the Route 28 Farmers Market, a small greengrocer. WT Grant closed in the 1980s and was replaced with a Drug Fair. Drug Fair, in turn, closed in 2009 and was replaced by Walgreens, which found it hard to fill the entire 30,000-square-foot space. So they blocked off a po