TOUR: Tops Friendly Markets - Skaneateles, NY

Tops Friendly Markets

Opened: 2010

Previous Tenants: P&C Foods

Location: 40 Fennell St, Skaneateles, NY

Photographed: August 2020

Kicking off our Finger Lakes/Southern Tier group with one of the nicest Tops stores in the area. This was a P&C Fresh location formerly owned by Penn Traffic, which went out of business for good in 2010 with Tops taking most of the stores in this region. This store had just been renovated by P&C, so Tops did only minimal renovations. It previously had a pharmacy, which has since been removed. For lots more detail on the P&C background, check out this great article on Syracuse.com.

This has to be the fastest store tour I've ever done. I couldn't have spent more than 2-3 minutes in the store (less than one song playing on the store's radio). I had two family members waiting for me in downtown Skaneateles, which by the way can be correctly pronounced "Skinny-atlas" or "Scanny-atlas". You enter in the middle of the storefront and turn left in the foyer to enter a grand aisle with produce on the left side and deli/prepared foods on the right side, bakery at the back, and meat/seafood on the back wall. Dairy is at the right side with frozen in the second-to-last aisle and natural/organic in the front corner.

One of the things that makes this store look so good is the black ceiling in the grand aisle. I am also a fan of this decor package.

I also love the angled pictures over deli/prepared foods. They're actually lit from the back (you can see one of the spotlights between two panels).

I don't know how much of the decor is left from P&C, but I believe the floor and ceiling are.

Do I have to say it again? I love Tops' bakery. One of the best in the Finger Lakes.

Pass-through to the rest of the store. Lunchmeats line the back wall with cheese on the back of the deli island. Skaneateles is a very upscale town, and the selection (such as the cheeses) represent this demographic.

Service meat and seafood about halfway across the back wall. Now over to the grocery aisles...

A very nice selection in 37,000 square feet, or a generally smaller supermarket.

Some of the stock looks a little light, but these pictures were taken near the end of the day. Side note, Skaneateles is not my kind of place at all. One of the reasons I was so fast in doing this tour is because I was impatient and wanted to move on to Auburn, the next city we'll be visiting and a place I cannot recommend visiting highly enough. Except maybe not via the Auburn Correctional Facility.

Nice but very plain grocery aisles.

Beer next to meat on the back wall, with milk in the back corner.

There seems to be a heck of a lot of frozen foods in this store, taking up one full aisle plus half of the next aisle plus an alcove in the front. Seems like a disproportionately large selection for a store of this size. For comparison, CitiGrocer in Elizabeth, NJ has only one aisle of frozen foods and it's only about 2,000 square feet larger than this store. (Of course, the sales floor is allocated very differently there.)

Dairy on the outside wall.

The frozen department seems to have been reset since it was last renovated, as "ice cream and desserts" is all frozen vegetables and fish.

Natural/organic next along the front wall, with customer service after that on the front wall in front of the registers.

A look across the front-end back towards produce. I'm assuming the little counter behind the man in the striped shirt was the pharmacy, and it still is something, I just didn't check what it is and I can't read that sign in the picture. Tops is the only supermarket in the very small town of Skaneateles; in fact, it's the only supermarket on Skaneateles Lake. Our next stop is at the northern tip of the next lake to the west, over at Owasco Lake. Check it out tomorrow over on The Independent Edition!