H Mart
Owner: Il Yeon Kwon
Opened: July 14, 2022
Previous Tenants: Key Food (closed 2010) > New York Marts (2011-2018) > iFresh (2018-2020)
Location: 142-41 Roosevelt Ave, Downtown Flushing, Queens, NY
Photographed: July 15, 2022
Welcome to downtown Flushing, a neighborhood in northern central Queens! Flushing is a dense urban neighborhood widely known for its large Asian population (roughly 70%, according to Wikipedia). Flushing has also, and partly for that reason, become a tourist spot -- let's just say I wasn't the only person taking pictures from the sidewalks. But downtown Flushing is anchored by the intersection of Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue about a block and a half west of this store, and again according to Wikipedia that intersection is the third-busiest in the city -- behind only Times Square and Herald Square.
I spent a day in Flushing, Corona, Jackson Heights, and Woodside not too long ago, visiting and photographing a whopping 66 stores in one day. 65 of those are going to have to wait, but I was here at the Roosevelt Avenue H Mart (the fifth in Flushing, if you count the H Mart-owned Goowha Market here in Downtown Flushing) just a day after it opened on July 14, 2022. The 18,000 square foot store was previously a Key Food supermarket, which closed in 2010 as the last remaining mainstream (which is to say non-Asian) supermarket in downtown Flushing. Chinese supermarket New York Marts opened in 2011 and converted the store to their brand iFresh in 2018 before closing in 2020 or early 2021. H Mart moved in and after renovating the space, opened last month.
I'm not sure how NYM/iFresh was set up, but H Mart has a fairly standard layout with produce lining the right side wall, meat on the back wall, and frozen/refrigerated on the left side and seafood in the back left corner. As far as I can tell, all of the decor and fixtures are new.
H Mart clearly had the store all ready for the grand opening (and the following day, I suppose, when I was here), with lots of produce and other perishables out on the shelves. It looked great, but then again it really should for opening day.
Ahem, Amazon.Although we see new and very attractive decor, it's not quite as deluxe as many other new H Marts -- including a
relatively newly-built store just to the north on Northern Blvd. I also have an H Mart in our regularly scheduled programming pretty soon that is much more deluxe than this one. That said, we did get fully new decor here -- the
newly opened store up in Quincy, Mass retains the decor entirely from its previous tenant, Roche Bros.
Meats line the back wall, but there's no service butcher counter. Not sure if other H Marts have them.
The space is small and cramped, which is forgivable because of its urban location. As we see here, grocery shelving and lighting are new in the aisles, and the flooring has been scraped down to concrete and finished.
I do try to take pictures without a lot of people in them, but it was very difficult in this store. It was quite crowded. Lots of employees and managers around too, directing traffic (as we see above).
There's a section for refrigerated foods in aisle 7, and aisle 8 is frozen foods. These cases are all brand new and look quite sharp...
And as we move over to the back wall, we have seafood in the back left corner.
Packaged fish is on the back wall, with the service counter lining the back half of the left side wall. It sticks out into the sales floor quite a bit, so there's another aisle or two in the front half.
As nice as this area is, I do think this decor is a bit flat compared to what we see in the more deluxe stores. The large empty spaces of corrugated metal is not the most beautiful, but the signage is quite nice.
Five H Marts in Flushing is still on the low end of the number they could fit into the neighborhood, given that almost 40% of the neighborhood is of Korean descent or is Korean immigrants. Another 20% or so of the neighborhood is Chinese, making Flushing New York City's
second-largest Chinatown behind, well, Chinatown.
Here we see frozen foods continuing beyond seafood. Kimchi and other refrigerated products are in front of the seafood department...
I think the store will continue to do a good volume after the opening week, if only because of the population density around here. If we look only at downtown Flushing (below Northern Boulevard), I count roughly 17 supermarkets in roughly half a square mile.
And here we see the beginning of the very long checkout line, which made it impossible for me to get a picture of the front-end from the refrigerated/frozen side of the store. Instead, we have a shot from the produce side of the store, looking across the front end towards refrigerated and frozen.
(As you can see, this walkway into the front-end was temporarily roped off to maintain the flow of traffic to the last aisle for a single line for all the registers.) I was very glad to get to this store so soon after it opened, and the grand opening excitement was definitely maintained for day 2. We have lots more to see in Flushing, but that'll have to wait! Tomorrow we get back to Philadelphia for a look at University City here on The Market Report.
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