TOUR: Riccardo's IGA - Dunmore, PA

Riccardo's IGA
Owner: Rocco Riccardo

Opened: ca. 2010 in this location, 1968 previously

Cooperative: IGA
Location: 1219 Wheeler Ave, Dunmore, PA

Photographed: December 18, 2019

We're east of downtown Scranton here in Dunmore, a midsized town of 13,000 that directly borders Scranton. We're going to tour the roughly 44,000 square foot Riccardo's IGA, which opened here around 2010 in what appears to have been a new-build location. Previously, they were just to the north in a roughly 22,000 square foot location now used for offices for a nonprofit (here's a look at that building when it was still a supermarket). The store was a ShurSave until around 2017, when they left the ShurSave coop and joined IGA. (This is the only IGA in the Wyoming Valley, although oddly it does not appear on the IGA website. The circular for this week both uses the IGA logo and advertises IGA brand products.)

Here's a look across the front-end if we look to the left when we enter. From there, we move on to produce, deli, and bakery in the grand aisle, also with a wine/beer area and a cafe.

I will admit upfront that my pictures of this store are disappointingly bad. I didn't take as many as I wanted, and the ones I have are not very good, like, uh...

This store is very nice, though, and I would recommend taking a look at Riccardo's own website for some more interior pictures.

Behind the produce department is the deli on the left and the cafe on the right side. I don't know what used to be in what's now the beer/wine department, although it's possible it was just carved out of what used to all be deli. This section now has its own entrance and exit.

And we can look across the main supermarket area, which actually isn't all that big. Overall the store feels a bit cramped for its rather substantial size.

Opposite the grocery aisles in the back is the rest of prepared foods and baked goods. There is a service bakery here, I believe, although I can't remember exactly where it was. Notice the hanging IGA promotional signage, of which there is a lot around the store.

And I'm not totally sure what's going on with that refrigerator below, which I believe used to hold sushi in the seafood department. Notice the Simply to Go branding on the top -- that's a brand of foodservice provider Sodexo, meaning that case is secondhand from somewhere like a hospital or school cafeteria.

In fact, I wonder if Riccardo's brought over fixtures from the old location for this one. Some, like that freezer above, look older than the store itself is, although I don't know if there was a delay between the old store closing and this one opening. Regardless, they could be secondhand from elsewhere.

Moving into the grocery aisles, we can see the roof here actually has a very slight pitch to it.

Customer service at the front of the store on the front end, next to the grand aisle.

I think the store looks really good, and I think especially in the center store, the dark flooring and ceiling work well.

A very bad shot of the meat department on the back wall. Here, too, I like the lighting and the colorful wall decor.

We then transition to dairy at the end of the store, and if I'm not mistaken, the last few aisles run perpendicular to the rest.

On the outside of the store we move into frozen foods. That's a lot of IGA promotional signage, and I wonder what was here before it. Was there previously some other sign here that was removed? Was a department removed here, which would explain the lack of signage and colorful wall patterns like the other departments have? I doubt that, though.

And frozen foods are in the front corner of the store, to finish out the tour.

Unfortunately I don't have a shot of the front-end from this side, but we got a glance at it in the first interior picture. I'll have to get back and re-photograph this store better than I did this time! Oh, and by the way, happy Halloween. Tomorrow is November already... and we're going to check out one last Gerrity's on The Market Report before we leave this area and continue heading north!