Kings Food Markets
Opened: 1982
Previous Tenants: Stop & Shop
Location: 381 Washington Ave, Hillsdale, NJ
Photographed: December 2020
It's time for our next Kings tour here in Bergen County! Unlike our last Kings in Ridgewood, this store was purchased in late 2020 by ACME and is expected to continue operating as a Kings going forward. (And by the way, that sale is closing today -- or at least it's expected to.) This is the first of a few Kings locations we're going to see that was built as a Stop & Shop during their first (1960s) entry into New Jersey, then sold to Kings in 1982. The 30,000 square foot store once shared the mall with a Medimart pharmacy owned by Stop & Shop, now a Walgreens.
Deli is on the front wall, with bakery up next on the right side of the store. Cheese is in an island facing, with meat taking up the rest of the first aisle and the back corner. Produce is in aisle 2 with the seafood department at the back of that aisle and dairy lining the back wall of the store. Frozen foods are in the last aisle with floral in the front left corner.
It's a bit odd that this layout involved the fresh foods separated into two aisles instead of one large grand aisle arrangement. But given the fact that another Stop & Shop-turned-Kings we'll see in a while has an identical layout, it's likely this was based on the Stop & Shop layout of the time.
Here we see the deli-bakery aisle, looking towards the front wall.
Meat is next in the back corner of the store.
As I feel with most Kings locations, the decor is very nice but clearly extremely low-cost. We now know that's because the remodels were a quick freshen-up to modernize the ailing chain's aging stores on very, very little money. In fact, the chain was preparing to close entirely in early 2020 when coronavirus-induced stocking up gave the company just enough cashflow to pursue a sale through bankruptcy.
It seems that towards the end of Kings' life prior to ACME actually taking over, the maintenance of the stores has really slipped. We see several lights out here, and I've seen other similar minor issues that could've been taken care of easily at the other stores.
Dairy and frozen seafood here on the back wall.
The grocery aisles look, I'd assume, approximately the same as when Stop & Shop was here since they're so nondescript. I would assume, though, that the shelving was installed when Kings moved in.
Health and beauty items. None of the Kings have pharmacies.
As we can see, the store is very nice but light on customers. ACME will have their work cut out for them as they turn around the 19 Kings stores they purchased. The preferred supermarket in Hillsdale is clearly the ShopRite, which we'll be touring tomorrow.
Floral in the front corner. The rest of the front-end is pretty standard...
That's all for this Kings! Come back tomorrow to check out the ShopRite at the north end of town!
Wow, that's crazy that the chain was just going to shut down entirely, prior to the extra sales from the panic buying. Glad they were able to ultimately go through bankruptcy and sell off many of the stores (and preserve the associated jobs). With ACME keeping the stores as Kings -- do you think that's a good idea, given the state of the stores seem to have fallen from their more upscale days, or would they do better if rebranded as ACMEs?
ReplyDeleteGood question. You know I'm no great fan of Kings and I love ACME, but I still think the stores should remain Kings. Many of them were purchased for a strategic reason of being the main competition to an existing ACME -- so it wouldn't make sense to convert them to ACMEs given their locations (check out some of these stores on Google Maps: Boonton Kings/ACME, Montclair Kings/ACME, Midland Park Kings/ACME, Hoboken Kings/ACME, Summit Kings/New Providence ACME), or some of them are high-volume but too small to be ACMEs (Livingston, Cresskill, Chatham). Others might be good candidates for conversion to ACME, such as the larger Morristown or Whitehouse Station stores which are also in slightly less-affluent areas. There's also speculation that small, upscale ACMEs in Little Silver and Fair Haven could eventually become Kings: https://www.reddit.com/r/Acme_Markets/comments/jx6ti3/any_thoughts_on_albertsons_acme_buying_kings_and/
DeleteI think ACME has two choices here, big-picture: (1) push Kings aggressively upscale, eliminate the basic grocery selections and bring in really unique items, or (2) push Kings aggressively mainstream, emphasizing lower prices and a more basic grocery selection. There's a justification for either, but I'd bet good money that they'll go with the first approach, especially since many Kings directly compete with ACMEs which are fairly mainstream. One thing is for certain, doing what Kings had been doing for years won't work out!
Gotcha -- that all makes sense, thanks. I agree that those close-by locations wouldn't do well to convert away from Kings, but it is interesting that the possibility exists at at least a couple of other locations (such as Morristown or Whitehouse Station, as you mention). Also very intriguing to think about the opposite happening -- smaller, upscale ACMEs converting into Kings. That would be something to see for sure!
DeleteYeah, when you put it that way, I agree with the first choice as well. I saw in your comments at that Reddit post that the purchase seems to be sort of a way to beat out Stop & Shop, but converting all of the Kings to ACMEs -- whether in name, or simply in store format -- probably wouldn't be smart in the end, as the stores could then likely succumb to cannibalization from each other. Keeping them separate brands is probably the better idea in the end -- they just have to do something different than what Kings was doing, as you said! Hope it all works out for them...