TOUR: ShopRite - Bordentown, NJ

ShopRite of Bordentown

Owner: Richard Saker / Saker Supermarkets

Opened: 1992

Previous Tenants: Two Guys department store (with food department in ShopRite's current footprint)

Cooperative: Wakefern Food Corp.

Location: 622 US-206, Bordentown, NJ

Photographed: January 2021

The 57,000 square foot ShopRite of Bordentown opened in 1992 in part of a former Two Guys, according to JoshAustin610. The other part of the store became a Bradlees, which until recently was still proudly listed on the monument sign for the strip mall. Because this store has none of the hallmarks of 1990s-era Saker stores (this store would've opened around the same time as Edison, likely), but is not unlike Pennington, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a Laurenti > Big V > Foodarama store as described on Whitehorse.

The store is set way back from the highway, making it impossible to see from 206 and very hard to get to (but even harder to get out of!). The former Bradlees space next door, which has remained vacant since Bradlees closed, is roughly 95,000 square feet and appears to be under construction for a replacement ShopRite (but may not be...? More on that soon). In this store, the layout is rotated 90 degrees from how we might expect it, with bakery/deli/seafood on the front wall and checkouts on the right-side wall. Meats are on the left-side wall with dairy/frozen at the back. Pharmacy and customer service are in islands facing the front-end. As we'll see, the layout is quite strange with a lot of awkward corners and I'm actually surprised that Saker hasn't replaced this store sooner. Given that this started as the food department of the Two Guys department store, I suppose it's possible the layout is set up in this way because what's now the front-end would've been open into the rest of the department store.

Here we're looking out from the bakery/deli area to produce. You can see how everything's on an angle, forming a more winding path through the  store.

Prepared foods and deli (with just a tiny fraction of the World Class Kitchens we find at other Saker stores, again making me think Saker did not build this store).

Seafood is up next on the front wall of the store. It's easy to lose your bearings once you're inside, but this department is in the front left corner of the store. We can see some of the neon starting to fail a bit here, but overall it's held up remarkably well...

Here we see meat on the left-side wall. The aisle markers are staggered, which is very interesting and not something I'm sure I've seen before. Notice also that these are much older than what we see in the other Sakers, even old ones like Pennington.

I do like the light fixtures attached to the ceiling, though! The heavy promotion of "This is your neighborhood, this is your ShopRite" set in that light fixture (something that the Laurenti/Big V stores seemed to do, given the bulletin board at Whitehorse) makes me think again that this was not originally a Saker.

Not all that much to see in the grocery aisles, once we get out of the crazy design of the perimeter.

Customer service and pharmacy, complete with deluxe neon signage, facing the front end.

Here we have some of the frozen cases in the back of the store, with the rest behind the row of freezers to the right. Or I suppose this is technically the back left corner of the store.

I wonder if there was originally signage on the metal siding here. It's possible there was neon department signage or something equally outdated that Saker opted to remove a while ago.

Dairy in the last aisle, which is the back wall of the store. It looks like these cases were probably original to the store's 1992 opening, although they may have also been brought in secondhand from there.

More of that metal paneling here in the dairy department.

And I believe this picture is from the back wall again, although I'm not sure.

And here we see across the front-end back towards the entrance. Here we're looking towards the front wall of the store with the checkout wall to our left. That wall divides the ShopRite from the former Bradlees space next door. Now for a look at the Bradlees space, which appears to be under construction for a new ShopRite...

What an enormous, bulky facade. As we can see, it wasn't that long ago that this store was still fully a closed Bradlees.

The facade has been kept up quite nicely since Bradlees closed, and appears to have been fixed up and repainted after the Bradlees logo was removed.

The entrance and exit doors were mostly closed off and covered up, but we can get a little glimpse inside...

Looks like this area is under construction and has assorted fixtures we might expect to see in a supermarket, such as those produce tables. For that reason, I wouldn't be surprised if Saker were preparing to open this as a new ShopRite and have a near-seamless transition from the old store. But it looks like the ShopRite is actually preparing to move to the back of the property and face the highway, which confuses me about this construction area then. According to these plans, this whole strip would be demolished. I wonder if those plans were canceled or scaled back for some reason.

As we can see, this is definitely an active construction zone. And a cool view looking back towards the main entrance of the ShopRite...

Well, I'll keep my eye on what is to happen here and I'll certainly do my best to get back if and when the new ShopRite opens! For our second Bordentown day tomorrow, we'll be heading down to the southern part of the town for two stores here on The Market Report. Come back to check it out!