Kings Food Markets
Opened: 1977
Previous Tenants: Food Fair > Finast
Location: 112 N Maple Ave, Ridgewood, NJ
Photographed: December 2020
Today's store tour is one of the Kings that was not sold to ACME in the 2020 bankruptcy, and is expected to close by the end of this month. The 15,000 square foot store was built in the 1950s as a Food Fair, then taken over by Finast somewhere around 20 years later. Kings moved in to the store in 1977.
The Kings competes with a Stop & Shop (built as a Grand Union) one block behind it, as well as a Whole Foods across town.
The grand aisle features a cheese island on the left side (just out of frame on the left here), with produce taking up most of the space and a liquor department at the back. Customer service is tucked away in the front corner to the right here. Seafood and meat are on the back wall with dairy on both sides of aisle 5 and frozen on both sides of aisle 6. These are the last two aisles, and both are shortened for a deli-bakery in the front corner.
Let's take a second to appreciate just how tiny that customer service counter and manager's office is. I have no idea where Food Fair would've put its customer service counter and office, but it's entirely possible that area has been basically unchanged since day one in the 1950s. But... check out how poorly installed that "At Your Service" sign is. The Y is at the wrong angle, "our" is lower than "At", and the "At" is too close to the S. Couldn't they have just spread it out horizontally? There's nothing else on the walls here.
Liquor department in the back. I can't tell whether this is an outside business, but it seems pretty much integrated into the store's sales floor.
Looking back up towards the front wall. We can see the back of the cheese island here, but unfortunately, the store manager was hanging out at the front of the island so I couldn't get a good shot of it.
Really nice seafood department for such a small store. Unfortunately, the meat department seems to have seen better days. The ceiling gets extremely low on the back wall, so I'm assuming Kings has pushed the sales floor into former backroom space. But we can see here how everything is on the older side. I'm assuming that combined with the Stop & Shop 500 feet away deterred ACME from purchasing this location.
Nice and clean grocery aisles, but we can see that the flooring and shelving are quite old as well.
Dairy takes up aisle 5, or the second-to-last aisle.
These cases are very newly updated.
A very abbreviated Kings Market Square here in the front corner. The bakery is the front wall, with deli on the left side wall of the store. Despite the tiny space, I do think they bake in-store here.
And for a look at the front end before we head out. Our next stop is just to the south tomorrow on The Independent Edition, before we head into Paramus! Make sure to check out tomorrow's store.
UPDATE 1/21/21: As of 7:46pm today, Estevez Markets has entered into an agreement with intent to purchase this store. They currently own Foodtown stores, including the Hastings-On-Hudson location and the short-lived Old Tappan store, along with a Green Way Market in Cross River, NY. (Note that that link for Old Tappan will only work once the post goes up on 1/26.) Because of this store's small size and upscale demographic, I can only imagine that Estevez will convert this store to a Green Way soon.
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