TOUR: Kings Food Markets - Bernardsville, NJ

Kings Food Markets
Opened: late 1980s

Previous Tenants: ACME Markets (1950s-1980s)

Location: 100 Morristown Rd, Bernardsville, NJ

Photographed: June and November 2020, January and July 2021

It's gonna be a big day, folks. This is our first store tour, and it's a long one. I also have a tour of the ShopRite across the street here, and a look at a former A&P just next to the ShopRite here.

That's a heck of a lot of coverage for a town of 7600 people. But here we are in Bernardsville, a town in the far northeastern corner of Somerset County. Bernardsville is to the west and northwest of the Great Swamp, and has a small business district here along route 202 (Morristown Road, which unsurprisingly goes into Morristown) and a pleasant little downtown just to the north. The Bernardsville Centre, seen here, was built in the 50s and anchored by an approximately 20,000 square foot ACME, which became Kings in the late 1980s. This store was never renovated into the 2012-era Where Inspiration Strikes decor package, and a renovation began in 2020 only to be put on hold by the chain's bankruptcy. More on that later. ACME Markets bought 19 of the 25 Kings stores, but like Gillette, Ridgewood, Maplewood, and Warren, this one was not purchased. It closed with Warren on January 20, 2021.

Let's head in and tour the store back when it was not technically slated for closure yet. These pictures come from my November 2020 visits to most of the Kings stores in operation.

Here we can see the rather bizarre treatment this store received. The old decor was removed from the walls, the ceiling was painted black, and the walls were painted that awful blue that seems to be everywhere in Kings' stuff now. (A note on the photos, the higher and lower portions of the wall are actually the same color but my phone wanted to make the lower one look gray. Who knows why.) Here in the first aisle, we have bakery and deli on the left wall, seafood at the back, and customer service at the front.

Here we have the customer service counter and the wonderful relic of a thank you sign over the exit. Hard to tell exactly how old it is, but I'd put money on the 90s -- if not original to the store in the 80s. We can also see that maintenance at this store really slipped, such as the lights burnt out (or about to) here. I think that was also happening chainwide, but I have to wonder how this store stayed in business for as long as it did. I visited once long ago, on a Saturday afternoon in maybe 2014, and my father and I were the only two customers in the store. As we'll see with this tour, not much changed in the following six years.

Tiny bakery in the front corner, although it does look like they baked in store. More burnt out lights here -- and remember that this store, at the time of my visit, had not yet been officially slated for closure. The deli was up next...

Looks like these deli cases were replaced soon before the store closed. Some of the fixtures were purchased by ACME and sent to other stores, but I don't remember whether that included the deli cases here.

Looking back up towards the front wall of the store. Interesting ceiling beams here -- I wonder what exactly they're from. They're almost like what we've seen in pitched-roof ACMEs, but this is a 50s-era flat roof ACME.

Well, if nothing else, photography was a breeze here because there was nobody else in the store practically! (Tour the ShopRite across the street and you'll understand why.)

Looking across the back wall. Some of these cases are pretty new, others are old and repainted recently. I really can't stand that blue, and I really hope nothing like this appears in the other Kings stores renovated under ACME's ownership. It all depends, of course, on how tightly ACME is controlling Kings' operations. The tighter the better, in my opinion. But I've said all that before.

Looking back to seafood in the corner.

There was a fun find in the grocery aisles, though...

These category markers, which match the thank you sign, may very well be original to the store in the 80s. Or perhaps a little newer than that.

Unremarkable grocery aisles, although I do like the ceiling and lighting treatment very much.

It's likely the store employees or management knew the store was going to close (or could guess) since we see things like the shelves and shelves of the same broth here.

Dairy here in the second-to-last aisle, with floral in the front corner opposite. Once again, we see maintenance clearly slipping in the lighting here too...

And produce lines the last aisle. That layout choice will forever baffle me.

Kings, however, has always done pretty well with having a solid produce selection even in the smallest stores.

Some of these fixtures are definitely original to Kings' opening, or maybe even ACME. I will be forever curious as to what this decor was supposed to look like!

You can weigh it right here! That sign, I assume, is also original to Kings' opening.

Mismatched checkout lane markers (and a customer! The woman in black is an employee) are as good a place as any to end our tour here. But that certainly doesn't mean this post is over! Go take a break, get a drink, use the bathroom, and come back -- it'll still be here. Now we're going to tour the store again on the day before it closed in January 2021...

Store closing sales were winding down, but the signage was still fully up. This was in the second wave of closures (Warren, Hoboken, and Maplewood were in the first wave). Signs direct customers to the Mendham location, and hey, guess where we're headed tomorrow!

I do wonder where all the shopping carts went. These are all pretty new, and they're mostly in good shape. There were some left over from before the 2012 logo change (although I saw many of those appear at Village ShopRites with the logos spray-painted out around 2013).

Let's head in to see the store at the very end...

That's all that was left of the perishables, and my pictures are a little limited in the first aisle because there were some employees hanging around doing nothing much and I didn't want to seem that suspicious.

I am dying to know what the decor was planned to be here. I suppose it's also possible there was no real plan and they were just refreshing the store a bit to try to make it more attractive to sell. But we do know that there was a more extensive change planned, which had just kind of begun, and we'll see some more on that momentarily.

Looking up to the front of the grand aisle from the seafood counter in the back.

Seafood and sushi long gone. I do love the fact that Kings' sushi program was called Sushi Maru and Village ShopRite has recently implemented the Mura Sushi program...completely coincidentally I'm sure. Village's sushi is way better than what Kings sold anyway.

So far, there doesn't seem to be any interest in this property. I'd assume that if anybody took it over, it wouldn't be a supermarket with ShopRite immediately across the street.

Interesting how the pre-2012 category markers, normally green, look so much like the design that Kings is using now when they're switched to blue for frozen.

A grocery aisle had been shortened here at some point, presumably to make way for seasonal items or nonfoods like the greeting cards that are now here. We also see all the grocery items consolidated into this one section for ease of sale.

Fascinating to see the shelving without the products and really focus on what fixtures display all these items. This section was nonfoods.

Dairy and frozen almost completely sold out, but not completely empty yet...

We also get to observe the Island of Misfit Toys here in the produce department with a crazy variety of cases that you don't really notice when they're fully stocked.

Had to come back for a close-up of this sign!

And a look at the front end. Well, that's all for the store-closing photos, but I returned again this past July to see what shape the store was in. I was surprised to find it looking just like Kings had closed the day before -- nearly everything, at least what was visible through the front windows, was still exactly where it was -- so I assume the landlord is hoping that another grocery tenant will move in and mostly keep everything where it is.

The almost-unreadable Kings sign had been taken down, although I believe there was still one out by the street.

The store closing signs were still there in the windows, if strangely altered (why remove "closed" and leave "this store location is now"?), and everything else was basically still there inside...

A few of the registers had been removed, which may be some of the fixtures ACME bought.

Looking down to the back of the grand aisle. I'm not sure honestly whether the lights were still on inside or not, because at the time of my visit, the entire town was experiencing a power outage. The ShopRite across the street, however, was still open but running on generators.

The doors on the front here, for whatever reason, were never actually used. The entrance and exit were left on the side wall from the ACME days.

It occurred to me, upon seeing this sign, that these Kings are the first supermarkets I visited that had closed during the coronavirus. For that reason, all the precautionary signage was still up at all the locations.

I assume that sign's break was not intentional, but if it fell down by itself, it's not still lying on the floor.

A final overview of the entrance and exit doors.

The real estate firm's leasing brochure gives us a look into what Kings had planned for the space. They had hired DeBarbieri Architects to design a new interior for the space. That firm has been responsible for several generations of Kings remodels, along with new-builds and renovations for other chains including ACME and ShopRite. For whatever reason, the leasing brochure includes (possibly accidentally) the proposed remodel floor plan, which was of course never completed, instead of the actual one. Here's a screenshot of that page:

So unfortunately, the quality is very low, but we get a general sense of what was supposed to happen. The entrance/exit would be moved to the front wall, as we see did actually happen. The grand aisle would be expanded on the left side of the store to include produce opposite the deli/bakery wall, and it looks like floral would be moved next to the entrance. Some service department (either customer service or bakery...?) would be moved to the front right corner where floral used to be, frozen would be moved to the last aisle, and dairy would be moved to the first aisle. Quite a substantial change to be proposed for a chain that had to know it was about to declare bankruptcy, right? If their only goal was to freshen up the stores to sell, I would assume they'd want to do some light work in all the stores, like painting walls and replacing lightbulbs, rather than this big remodel in such a small store with such significant competition. I wonder what the relationship with the architect is since they closed the store in the middle of this extensive remodel! (Not particularly relevant and this is all my speculation but I assume they still have a good relationship since the unbelievably slow Livingston remodel also is supervised by DeBarbieri.) Before we leave Bernardsville, make sure to tour the ShopRite across the street and take a look at the former A&P next door. That's a whole lot of stuff, so tomorrow, we have a nice easy day -- just one store tour, here on The Market Report!