Kings Food Markets
Opened: unknown
Previous Tenants: none
Location: 1212 Shipyard Ln, Hoboken, NJ
Photographed: December 2020
We're here right on the water to tour our next Kings Food Market! There were two Kings locations in Hoboken, both smaller-format urban stores branded Kings Fresh Ideas. That branding seems to have been phased out in recent years. The other location, at 325 River Street, closed in Kings' bankruptcy in December 2020 -- just before I got out to Hoboken. The River Street store was one of two to not receive the 2012-era Where Inspiration Strikes remodel, the other being Bernardsville, which also closed. This Shipyard Lane location has been taken over by ACME and will continue to operate as a Kings. I visited the approximately 8400 square foot store about three weeks before the sale to ACME closed.
The storefront actually faces Shipyard Lane, the side street behind the store. The front of the store, facing Hudson Street and shown in the first picture, is functionally the store's back.
The store is absurdly cramped and incredibly poorly laid out, not a good combination when it's also packed with people. We enter here on Shipyard Lane to produce and meat/seafood, which line the left side wall of the store (shown above). A few very short grocery aisles run from side to side, in other words perpendicular to the street, with dairy and frozen taking up the far right side of the store. A tiny deli and prepared foods area and some registers are in the corner of the store closest to where I'm standing above. Let's head in, and my apologies in advance for the picture quality...
The nice polished concrete floor, exposed black ceiling, and exposed brick make this one of the nicest Kings decor-wise (compare to the average decor package in Midland Park). It's also a much newer Kings, though as we'll see, even some of their newer stores were much more bland.
Meat and seafood at the back of the produce aisle. The only service department here is deli, which we'll see towards the end.
The rest of the meat wall on this end of the store. Now I must admit, I don't remember where all these pictures in the grocery aisles were taken, so let's just take a look...
The grocery aisles are extremely short. Here's a wall -- is it an outside wall? Is there a backroom on the other side? Is the frozen/dairy aisle on the other side? That's anyone's guess.
I think we're looking at the end of the produce/meat aisle here, with the produce cases on the other side of the case we see here with sausage.
The store is in an awesome repurposed building, it just needs to be about three times the size it is. I'm pretty sure above we're looking towards the dairy/frozen wall with Hudson Street outside those windows.
And looking in the other direction here, with produce and then Shipyard Lane on the other side of those windows.
This aisle straight ahead, which we see displaying pasta, runs along the Shipyard Lane side of the store with frozen and dairy behind it.
Looking up towards the front of the store. I love the treatments on these posts -- a great way to turn a necessity into a decor element!
Dairy/frozen tucked away behind the pasta here on the outside wall.
And this last aisle switches over to prepared foods with an olive bar in the front of the store...
If you go around the corner from this Where Inspiration Strikes wall, you can either make a left to deli/sushi or a right to the nightmare labyrinth that makes up the checkouts.
The deli is beautiful, but prepared foods are looking pretty cleaned out at the end of the day. A small sushi counter and the Hudson Street entrance are at this end of the store...
Turning around, the registers send you out the Shipyard Lane doors, and yes, there are actually registers behind all that...
That's all for Hoboken! Up next, we're going to head about a mile to the west up to Union City for one more store (in addition to our previous extensive coverage) that we didn't see the first time around. Check it out tomorrow here on The Market Report!
That's right, Albertsons bought them via Acme and they will continue to operate their acquired locations as Kings since it's an upscale chain. Similar to its sister chain, Vons, which operates an upscale chain, Pavillions.
ReplyDeletePopped in here this afternoon for a sandwich and was surprised to see they recently added 4 self-checkouts! The 3 full-service registers reman in place and 2 of them were open. This too surprised me since the West New York Acme has basically gone ALL self-checkouts.
ReplyDeleteOh, wow! Thanks for the update -- the changes in my local Kings have been literally nothing since day 1. They're even still getting deliveries from Wakefern, which I assume is still going on chainwide. Good to hear there's something going on out there!
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