Stop & Shop
Opened: ca. 2000
Welcome back to the Highland Park Stop & Shop! We toured this store as we passed through New Jersey on our first round, and when its closure was announced I knew I had to get back to check it out.
Although the store had not begun its official liquidation when I visited, the closure had been announced for some time at that point and signage around the store informed people it was closing.
We're going to take a look around the store again, just for fun. Nothing has changed, of course, except for the thinning out of merchandise around the store.
Although the liquidation hadn't actually begun yet, the shelves were definitely starting to thin out, although strangely not much in the fresh departments. The grocery aisles, as we'll see, had much less stock than the perimeter.
Produce was mostly stocked, which surprised me. Is it common for the fresh departments to continue to be stocked until closing, while the grocery aisles thin out?
Here we can see the significant reduction in stock, although nothing was discounted or on clearance. In fact, the products all had appropriate price tags and the areas with no stock had no price tags, so the store may have been reset to reduce the merchandise displayed before the official closing process.
Also, the general merchandise was removed from above the grocery shelving in the middle.
But in the dairy department, some shelves were completely cleared.
Similar in the frozen department with big empty spaces and several cases blocked off with a few bins of clearance products.
As we see, this is the only clearance area of the store at the time of my visit, about two weeks before the store's official closing.
But clearly the store had stopped being restocked some time before.
I'm glad I got to get some more close-ups of the decor here!
Up in the deli department, most of the cases were stocked but clearly starting to thin out too.
I love the design of this area. I'm sure back when the store opened (probably as an Edwards, and definitely as a Mayfair before that) it was very stylish. Now it just looks haphazard and outdated.
The former bakery case was elegantly covered by what appears to be a plastic tablecloth taped over it.
An overview of the bakery/deli area.
And that's about all of our look at the Highland Park Stop & Shop! It's worth seeing but I do hope that a new supermarket moves in and updates the space.
Which brings us to the question, who might want this store? It's only 26,000 square feet, making it too small for LIDL, which still seems to be expanding a lot in this area. A Key Food affiliate would fit well here, but they'd need to do a lot of renovation.
Opened: ca. 2000
Previous Tenants: Mayfair Foodtown > Edwards
Location: 424 Raritan Ave, Highland Park, NJ
Photographed: March 3, 2023
We have a few more updates today, so be sure to check out the Coney Island Ave Ideal Food Basket and the Kings in Livingston and Millburn!
I'd like you to get an update on the Acme locations in Oak Ridge and Allendale now that they have been renovated, as well as Wantage as they are in the progress of renovation.
ReplyDeleteGive it up!
DeleteGive what up? I was only asking about an update about Acme locations in Oak Ridge, Allendale and Wantage.
DeleteLook -- the earliest I could possibly get to any of those locations is mid-June, so there is no way you will be getting any updates before then unless you would like to visit and photograph the stores and send in your pictures. It is very rude to continue to ask about them including AFTER you've been told to stop, not just by me but by other readers. This is the last time I am going to respond to or publish any of your comments about these renovations.
DeleteAlso: seeing that slogan "A better place to shop, a better place to save" reminds me of a similar slogan Service Merchandise used in the early 1990s when Bill Cosby did commercials for it.
ReplyDeleteAt that size, maybe Aldi?
ReplyDeleteDefinitely could be, although I'm not sure this is the right location for them. It's not on a highway or other major thoroughfare (NJ-27 here is really just the main street through town more than a major artery). That said, they may want another location close to New Brunswick since they only have the one on the northern side of the city.
DeleteI would think that a Kosher supermarket, Asian supermarket or Indian supermarket would make sense given the area.
DeleteThat's definitely possible. All of those are good options.
DeleteIs the decor in this store from Edwards or is it an early Stop and Shop interior? I'm not familiar with any of the Ahold decor packages prior to the yellow and purple one with the arched departmental signage. That is the first decor package that Ahold started using in Giant-MD stores that were up for renovation. This would have been in the late 2000s when the last pre-Ahold Giant-MD decor package (Fresh Ideas, Great Values) was approaching 15 years old.
ReplyDeleteOn the subject of Lidl, they have taken over some regular size traditional grocery store locations and only used half of the space. What is interesting is at a couple of places that Lidl did this they did not sublet out the extra space. I don't know if they are using it for distribution, storage, training or what. But in any case, Lidl doesn't seem to be doing to well against Aldi down here in the DC area. They've had a couple of fully built stores that they waited months to actually open. When I've been in Lidl they seem stocked well but without customers. Whereas Aldi is always consistently busy to absolutely packed. We don't have any Save-A-Lot or other stores like that so Lidl and Aldi are all we have in the hard discount space.
That is the first decor package that Stop & Shop used in New Jersey. That is what would've been installed in the Edwards conversions. Edwards' decor looked like this: https://www.marketreportblog.com/2019/09/tour-tops-friendly-markets-canandaigua.html That decor was still intact in at least two Stop & Shops until lately, one in Flatbush, Brooklyn that's now a Food Bazaar, and one in Piscataway, NJ that still mostly has that decor.
DeleteI agree with your assessment of LIDL. In my town in New Jersey, there's a fully built-out LIDL that's been waiting to open for at least seven months now. They seem to be moving very slowly lately, especially when compared to their earlier expansion.