Look Inside: The Gladwyne Market - Gladwyne, PA

The Gladwyne Market

Owner: Renee Riccio

Opened: 2009 under current ownership, early 1900s previously

Cooperative: none
Location: 359 Righters Mill Rd, Gladwyne, PA

Photographed: December 2021

We start our look at Pennsylvania with this unique store, in the small town of Gladwyne about nine miles northwest of Center City Philadelphia. As we might expect from the name on the front, The Gladwyne Market House (referred to now as simply the Gladwyne Market most places) is, well, a market in a house.

In fact, the Gladwyne Market takes up about 1400 square feet of the ground floor of this house, in what seems to be a very historically-preserved location. This store has continuously operated as a grocery store for over 100 years, but in 2009, it was acquired by the owners of The Market of Lafayette Hill about three and a half miles north.

Gladwyne is a community of 4000 with a median household income of around $160,000, so this store is naturally both very small and very high-end. It appears to be a combination of what used to be two storefronts, and we enter the one on the right. The store is laid out like a horseshoe around what I assume is stairs to the second floor. We enter on the right of the horseshoe with deli, prepared foods, bakery, and grocery on the right part, meat and seafood at the back, and produce, dairy, frozen, and registers in the front left part.

I have mentioned that the store is quite small. Here we get to see just how small it is, with the deli/bakery/prepared foods counter taking up the right side wall of the store. And on the left side of this first room is the grocery selection, with some of the basics...

Certainly no more than one of each type of product! There's a larger selection of potato chips because, I assume, people use this store as a deli to get lunch or dinner to go and need chips on the side.

In the back left corner, we have the service meat/seafood counter, with the produce department and some more baked goods and snacks here too. If this isn't an efficient use of space, I don't know what is! I also will take a moment to point out the flooring, which is original (or a very nice reproduction) hardwood. We can also see that many of the fixtures have been updated (such as the produce case and the bakery table), but others are older and repainted and fixed up (such as the meat and deli cases). Some of that work may have occurred when ownership changed in 2009.

And our final picture is looking up towards the front of the store in the second aisle or room, with the register on the left in the front. You see how small the place is, but how they truly do have a little of everything! I know I say that a lot about smaller supermarkets, but in this place, selection is an extreme sport. This may currently be the only grocery store in Gladwyne, but it wasn't always, and it won't be again soon. Check out a closed supermarket just 200 feet away tomorrow on Grocery Archaeology!