TOUR: BG's Value Market - Minersville, PA

BG's Value Market

Owner: Dianne Koval

Opened: ca. 1980s

Cooperative: none
Location: 70 Kings Village, Minersville, PA

Photographed: November 29, 2019

Welcome to Kings Village, a strip mall just outside of Minersville, PA. The strip mall appears to have been constructed in the early 1960s with a roughly 50,000 square foot King's department store (later Jamesway, now subdivided) and a 14,000 square foot Centennial A&P. The A&P was later expanded out to just over 21,000 square feet, before closing somewhere around the 1980s. BG's Value Market opened at some point thereafter, although I really don't know when. It also appears they take up only the original 14,000 square foot A&P, with the expansion now being filled by a Family Dollar. Based on the name, I was expecting BG's to be a discount store, something like this. Instead, it's a full supermarket with a little bit of everything and a great bakery. It's not high-end, but it's certainly not a discount supermarket.

Produce is on the right side of the store, along with some frozen foods and baked goods. Deli is in the back corner, with meat next to that and the rest of frozen on the far left side of the store. It's a very odd layout that isn't helped by the massive amounts of seasonal and nonfoods merchandise everywhere, leading to a lot of poorly-used space. But the store otherwise is very pleasant.

As we can see, there's a lot of random merchandise in what might be considered the grand aisle. Just a lot of clutter that could be turned into a much more logical supermarket layout. I'd love to know the development of this store over time and how it ended up this way, since I doubt the store was designed like this. Was the produce department cut way back in size, for instance?

I also don't know what this store looked like as an A&P, so it's possible some of this layout made sense at one point. As I said, I believe BG's footprint is slightly smaller than that of A&P.

Deli at the back of what we might call the grand aisle, with baked goods around. Neither this store nor the next BG's we're going to see actually has a dedicated service bakery department, but their baked goods were quite nice. I believe our next BG's had a slightly larger bakery selection.

Looking back up towards the front of the grand aisle...

And meats are on the back wall. As we can see, many of the fixtures have been updated pretty recently here, and there seemed to be a lot of people in the store, so I'm assuming it's doing well.

Once we get into the grocery aisles, everything is pretty standard. Notice the big circular A&P-era air vents on the ceiling!

I'm not remembering for sure what storebrand BG's uses, but I believe it's Best Yet.

In the last aisle we have the frozen foods department. As we see, there's not a lot of decor around the store but there is some in frozen.

It's not A&P decor for sure, but I'm not positive BG's installed it either. Was there another tenant here between the two?

And a look at the rather no-frills front-end...

Despite the store's quirks, it seems to be a solid and well-used supermarket. The other two BG's I've been to are much less quirky. There is one I haven't yet been to.

Enough about other BG's... tomorrow we're headed out to Pine Grove, about 11 miles southwest from here, to check out one of their other locations!