TOUR: ShopRite - Franklin/Sussex, NJ

ShopRite of Franklin

Owner: Dominick & David Romano / RoNetco Supermarkets

Opened: unknown

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: Wakefern Food Corp.

Location: 270 NJ-23, Franklin, Sussex, NJ

Photographed: July 2020

We return to the ShopRite of Franklin, NJ (Sussex County, not to be confused with Franklin, NJ in Somerset) after initally seeing it in a quick snapshot in 2018. The store, after all of its assorted expansions and remodels, comes out at 73,000 square feet being extremely wide but rather shallow. My 2018 post (with pictures from July 2017) shows the store with a white awning, which has since been repainted dark green. Not sure that's an improvement, honestly.

We enter to the produce aisle, although as we can see here it's not actually on the right side wall of the store. It used to be, it seems, with the pharmacy here on the front wall, but there are an additional few aisles to the right of the produce aisle.

This expansion area is primarily chips and beverages.

As we can see, this space is rather awkward but I suppose it makes sense to place these items here. But why isn't this HABA and nonfoods/cleaning, which would seem to make more sense next to the pharmacy?

I would assume the latest renovation, which would include exterior and interior work as well as the final expansion, would've taken place in the 90s. Around 2019, the store was freshened up again as we saw in Succasunna.

This area is not exactly unattractive, but I get the feeling it wasn't exactly designed but just sort of happened. Check out the weirdly spaced air vents and ceiling setup, and the poorly-aligned floor tiles...

Back in the main supermarket we have the produce aisle which, as we can see, is not exactly the most modern. RoNetco stores are certainly not the most exciting design-wise but are, from my experience, quite pleasant to shop in (except when they get crowded, of course).

Looking back up to the front of the produce aisle. Interesting, and very space-efficient, multi-tier shelving here. The design of this space is very practical more than attractive, where Weis beats them by far. The Weis is actually so close you don't even have to go out on route 23 to get there from here.

Towards the back of the first aisle, we have sushi and cheese in an island with deli and seafood on the back wall.

I have to wonder, especially with the floor patterns here, whether this area was originally set up differently. The layout is rather strange, but that actually holds for the whole store.

Seafood in the back of the first aisle.

And in the first grocery aisle after produce, we have HABA and nonfoods in the first few also.

This shelving looks to date back to the 90s as well, although the floor was definitely refinished since then.

Updated decor, but not fixtures, along the back wall here.

Interesting to note the aisle markers here, which probably date back to the mid-00s. The stylized shopping cart we see on the left comes from the post-2001 logo, so the aisle markers are probably slightly newer than the rest of the store's renovation. Note that the expansion presumably took place before then because the exterior would've had the pre-2001 logo.

Frozen foods in the second and third to last aisles, if I remember correctly.

We move into dairy in the last aisle and in the back corner. Although I do like the brick decor for the Dairy Cooler sign, I am not sold on the blue wall color for the rest of the department.

20 aisles in total, with dairy in #20.

I believe that the dairy department continues onto the front wall (as I mentioned, the store is very wide so there's extra space on the front). Bakery and then the registers take up the rest of the front end.

I do like this decor, but I feel like the overall appearance of the store is more than a little disjointed.

And that wraps up our tour of the ShopRite of Franklin! Don't forget to see the Weis next door here. If you take a look at the exterior pictures of the Weis and then the ShopRite, you can see that the sky was getting more and more threatening. Well, I bought my lunch at this store and went out to the parking lot through an absolute downpour which hadn't started when I was entering. Unforunately, even my umbrella wasn't enough to stand up to the rain the day I was up in Sussex County, and we'll see more stores through the pouring rain (wait until we get to Newton). But up next we are heading to the northeast into Vernon for their store, which I photographed on a dry day in December instead of a rainy summer day. Check it out here on The Market Report tomorrow!