TOUR: Whole Foods Market - Morristown, NJ

Whole Foods Market
Opened: 2015

Previous Tenants: A&P (1969-2013)

Location: 110 Washington St, Morristown, NJ

Photographed: August 2019

Our second Morristown store is actually a lot like one we saw not long ago. The Madison Whole Foods, which is about five and a half miles to the southeast, is also a former centennial A&P with a similar layout, though we'll see that this store is a little different. For one, it wasn't built as an A&P -- it was built as a car dealership, later becoming A&P in 1969. And believe it or not, A&P actually hung on to this approximately 20,000 square foot store until 2013. Check out Acme Style's 2010 coverage of the store here. Acme Style also mentions three additional surviving centennial stores, Bedminster, Goldens Bridge, and Katonah. We toured Bedminster here, and I've actually also photographed Goldens Bridge (which is today an ACME) and Katonah (which is a DeCicco Family Market), so we'll see those someday.

But for now, let's tour Morristown! Like Madison, the store is rotated from its original arrangement, meaning checkouts line the wall facing the parking lot, not the street. Produce runs along the front wall, with meat/seafood on the right side wall, deli/bakery/prepared foods in the back, and registers along the left side wall. Health and beauty is in the first few aisles.

So this would've been A&P's front corner, approximately where the manager's office would've been (see Acme Style's pictures).

Service butcher is up next on the right side wall. I really like the decor here, and it fits with the feeling of Morristown -- that it's right on the edge of suburbia, in a way. Because the decor clearly has more rustic influences, but still looks a little urban.

So Whole Foods' aisles run from side to side, compared to how A&P's aisles were.

Also like Madison, part of the A&P building had an arched roof, which was exposed in Whole Foods' renovation.

You'll have to excuse the following picture, but it's all I have of the right-side wall, behind seafood/butcher...

You can, however, catch a glimpse of the exposed beams in the ceiling here.

And in frozen foods, we can get a really good look at the ceiling. Great category markers, by the way.

And looking back up towards the front wall of the store (produce/seafood). Funny how the wooden panels above the freezers to the left actually look a lot like what A&P was using!

And an overview of the prepared foods/deli area in the back. Cheese is in the back right corner, with deli/prepared foods lining the back wall, and bakery on the back part of the left side wall.

And, of course, the self-service food bars take up the middle of the area.

Here's a question I've been wondering for a while now: does Whole Foods use a completely different decor package in every single store? I don't believe I've ever seen two stores with the same decor, but is it possible that they just scatter them so that Morristown might have this decor along with Minneapolis and San Antonio, or whatever? Or is this decor package truly unique to Morristown?

Bakery, and then the registers, run along the left side wall of the store.

And customer service is in the front left corner of the store. Here's more of that wood paneling that looks so much like A&P's. It's definitely a coincidence, though, since this store didn't really have much of the paneling and it wasn't painted beige the way we saw in that picture of Mahwah, it was the original gray which doesn't look much like this.

That wraps up our look at this Whole Foods, and tomorrow we're heading into downtown Morristown (or just to the north, I guess, on Speedwell Ave) to take a look inside a small store we've seen before on The Independent Edition, along with a former supermarket nearby on Grocery Archaeology!