The Market Report

ShopRite of Chatham Owner: Robert Sumas / Village Super Market Opened:  1970 Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  Wakefern Food Corp. Location:  641 Shunpike Rd, Chatham, NJ Photographed:  August 2019 This store certainly wins the prize for most unusual exterior of a ShopRite! I believe it also wins the prize for smallest ShopRite, at just about 25,000 square feet. This quite attractive strip mall opened in 1970 with the Village ShopRite as the anchor on the eastern end. It's a two-level strip mall, and I assume the ShopRite probably has a basement in the back, though there are also stores on the lower level on the two sides. Despite the store's small size, it's been nicely maintained. There's no competition in this immediate area, though there is both a Stop & Shop and a Whole Foods just over a mile away in downtown Madison. Those are our next two stops, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. The Chatham ShopRite was probably built with the same decor package

Kings Food Markets Opened: mid-1990s Previous Tenants:  Foodtown Location:  86 E Main St, Mendham, NJ Photographed:  July 2020 About four miles to the south in Bernardsville , we saw store-closure signage at the Kings directing people to the Mendham location. Well, here we are! This store was one of the 19 purchased by ACME in Kings' 2020 bankruptcy, and ACME officially took over in January of 2021. My photos come from right before Kings declared bankruptcy, in July of 2020. This is, as we'll see, a very nice Kings -- although it has the same decor as most and the same layout as quite a few, it's been kept up very nicely. The 28,000 square foot building is much deeper than it is wide, and was built as a Foodtown before becoming Kings in the early to mid 90s. One of the reasons I suspect ACME was interested in this location, and probably why it does pretty well, is that there's no other grocery store in the very affluent town of Mendham, and the nearest competition is a