TOUR: ShopRite - South Plainfield, NJ

ShopRite of South Plainfield
Owner: Richard Saker / Saker Supermarkets

Opened: 2016

Previous Tenants: A&P > unidentified Asian supermarket > Pathmark

Cooperative: Wakefern Food Corp.

Location: 3600 Park Ave, South Plainfield, NJ

Photographed: July 2020

Time for another spectacular Saker ShopRite! The Plainfields were ShopRite-less until 2016 when the Sakers took over a former A&P futurestore-turned-Pathmark Sav-A-Center and expanded it to an enormous 78,000 square feet. A&P moved across the street in the late 90s, a space that later became an ACME before being subdivided for an ALDI and smaller tenants. Comments over on Flickr show that this store closed as an A&P in the late 90s, then became an Asian supermarket for a few years before Pathmark took the space and opened in 2008. (That link also has some great photos of the store before ShopRite came in.) The property even still has an A&P Futurestore-era monument sign on the street, which you can see to the far left in the below picture or a closeup here.

The mall is located at the corner of Park Avenue and Oak Tree Road, and if that sounds familiar, it's because we're finally circling back up past the Iselin area where we saw six, count 'em, six grocery stores on Oak Tree Road a little more than two miles east. And those would be Apna Bazar, India Grocers, Patel Brothers Edison, Patel Brothers Iselin, Asian Grocery, and Subzi Mandi. (Yeah, for our out-of-state readers, it's a small state. Things are close together here.)

Well, I don't know how much there is to say about this store, now that we've gotten the history out of the way. It's a lot like the other Saker ShopRites we've previously seen, if a little newer. That is to say it's pretty amazing, but it'll definitely look familiar inside...

We enter on the left side of the store to the produce aisle. A Dunkin' Donuts, sushi bar, and stir fry bar are on the front wall, with prepared foods and deli lining the left side of the store. Bakery and cheese are at the back of the deli/produce aisles, with seafood and meat continuing along the rest of the back wall. The Nutrition Center takes up the first three grocery aisles, with frozen and dairy at the far right of the store and pharmacy in the front right corner.

Beautiful produce aisle, of course. I do wonder why Saker doesn't open up the produce department so that there can be one large grand aisle instead of two separate, defined aisles (since deli runs along the left side wall of the store, behind the produce cases visible on the left).

Looking to the front of the store from the back of the produce aisle.

Dunkin' Donuts, sushi, and stir fry on the front wall of the store, with the cafe in the front corner.

The rest of the prepared foods and deli (which actually looks a little smaller here than the other Sakers, not that it's actually small) line the left side of the store.

And packaged deli items are in the islands facing this and packaged bread on the right side of this aisle, on the back of the produce cases. There's also a counter for subs in the middle, sorry for the blurry picture...

Deli as far as the eye can see.

And a huge bakery department takes up the back corner. I have to say, I actually don't like this setup as much as the similar one that we saw in Branchburg where the bakery and Chinese food are in the second aisle and produce is in the first. This doesn't quite seem to flow as well.

This layout places cheese weirdly far away from the deli, between bakery and produce which is just odd to me.

That said, the Saker stores are some of the few mainstream supermarkets that feature full-service cheese counters in all of their stores with some cheeses cut to order in the display case.

Sadly, we must move on from this wonderland of ready-to-eat items into the grocery aisles...

Seafood and meat are on the rest of the back wall, with the grocery aisles to the right.

Okay fine, one last look towards the bakery/cheese corner. But now on to the Nutrition Center.

The Nutrition Center collects most of the natural and organic grocery items, household goods, and health and beauty items in one place, but since the store is so large many of the items are duplicated elsewhere in the store.

It also contains bulk foods, vitamins, protein bars, and things like that.

Up next on the back wall is service seafood and butcher, with packaged meats facing the service counters.

Strangely, the Saker ShopRites don't have full service butcher counters, although they all do have these service windows and I frequently see people getting custom cuts. I just wonder why they're not arranged for service counters.

Packaged meats take up the island in the middle of the back wall, with frozen meats on the wall.

Heading back into the grocery aisles, we see an A&P-inspired Kitchen Shop with a very large selection of kitchenware. These were found in many of the A&P Foodmarket stores of the 90s, and some even still have the signage up. (We'll be touring an A&P-turned-ShopRite, even, that still has the A&P Kitchen Shop sign up inside!)

Health and beauty at the far right side of the store.

Aisle 20 is health and beauty, then 22 is frozen and 23 is frozen on the inside and dairy on the outside.

Frozen foods looking towards the ShopRite from Home corner in the front of the store.

Milk on the back wall, then dairy continues down the rest of the last aisle.

The Saker stores do a lot of business for in-store shopping, but I think they've also had a big home-ordering business for quite a while now since their stores have very large and prominent ShopRite from Home staging areas.

Pharmacy is up next on the front wall, and the registers take up the rest of the front end. I believe there's an entrance/exit on this side of the store as well as the main one, but I could be wrong.

That's all for this ShopRite, and make sure you check out the A&P-turned-ACME-turned-ALDI across the street over on Grocery Archaeology today, too! Tomorrow we're going to be heading up Park Avenue to see the ALDI that the new one replaced right here on The Market Report.