TOUR: Kings Food Markets - Montclair, NJ

Kings Food Markets
Opened: by 1964

Previous Tenants: none

Location: 650 Valley Rd, Montclair, NJ

Photographed: December 2020

It's not the first time we've seen this Kings in the Upper Montclair section of Montclair Township. We previously took a look at the 18,000 square foot store in a snapshot back in 2019. But I returned in December 2020 for a tour as I tried to photograph every Kings before the sale to ACME went through. And by the way, if you missed yesterday's tour of the Montclair ACME, check it out here. For the record, I have now photographed every Kings except for two, the one up in Greenwich, CT and the Hoboken South store which closed in December 2020, and I only have an exterior shot of Garden City on Long Island. Greenwich and Garden City were purchased by ACME. For now, we're going to focus on Montclair, which has produce lining the first aisle on this (right) side of the store, meat-seafood on the back wall, dairy in the second-to-last aisle, and frozen in the last aisle with deli-bakery in the front left corner. There's an entrance and exit at either front corner, with parking on both sides and in the back.

The store is looking very good, I must say. But -- at least at the time of my visit -- it seemed to be less popular than the ACME. Like most Kings locations, the facility is very old but has been mostly updated.

Meats on the back wall. The flooring is probably from several decor packages ago, and the cases are also probably much older and have been painted.

It's hard to place the age of the flooring in the aisles, though, since it's plain white. It could've been resurfaced many times. Clean and nicely stocked, though.

Service seafood on the back wall near the end of the store. (It's mostly empty because I visited in the morning before the counter had been fully set up.)

Dairy on one side of aisle 7, the third-to-last aisle. The rest is in aisle 8...

We can also see the transition from older to newer flooring here, and you can see a little bit of the deli-bakery corner on the front wall straight ahead.

Frozen foods on both sides of aisle 9, the last aisle. The ceiling section sticking out straight ahead is the deli counter.

It seems this store is too small to have the service cheese setup we've seen at other Kings, so cheese is in an upright case in the dairy aisle. Deli-bakery faces...

Deli straight ahead and bakery to the left on the front wall of the store. There's an entrance and exit hallway behind the bakery. Now for a look at the front-end...

Notice the scaled-down but still attractive floral department on the front end here, with checkouts lining the rest of the front end and customer service on the far side next to bakery. I will say, Kings (at least the store I frequent) never has enough registers open, so I do hope ACME replaces some of the standard registers with self-checkouts. Counterpoint: ACME's self-checkouts are really awful. That wraps up our tour of this ACME, and Upper Montclair, although we will circle through the lower part of the township later in our travels. For now, we're heading west to Cedar Grove for another tour here on The Market Report!