ShopRite
Owner: Inserra Supermarkets
Opened: November 17, 2023
Previous Tenants: none
Cooperative: Wakefern Food Corp.
Location: 180 Broadway, Elmwood Park, NJ
Photographed: February 17, 2024
Welcome to the ShopRite of Elmwood Park! Built on the site of a former Kmart that was previously a
Grand-Way department store and in the next block over from the onetime Grand Union headquarters. Times change, and the Grand Union has come and go, as has the Pathmark built just behind the headquarters, and the
ACME that replaced it. Now, half of the ACME is a LIDL, and a 58,000 square foot ShopRite occupies the property once holding a multi-story flagship department store.
The store is owned by Inserra Supermarkets, which has around 35 supermarkets in northeastern New Jersey and in
Rockland County, New York. It's similar to the Inserra store in
Fair Lawn, which is only about two miles northeast. The Fair Lawn store, though, is around 12,000 square feet larger.
That said, the Elmwood Park store is plenty large and feels quite spacious, especially because it is bright and airy, and has a high ceiling. It's a bit less deluxe than Fair Lawn, for instance lacking the sushi counter, cafe, and dietitian's office that Fair Lawn has.
We enter on the right side of the store to the grand aisle, with deli, prepared foods, and bakery on the right side and produce facing. Seafood and meat are on the back wall, with dairy and frozen on the left side. It's a very straightforward layout and the store felt a bit no-frills, but not in a bad way.
Speaking of bad, the produce here was just awful. To give them the benefit of the doubt, though, I was there towards the end of the afternoon on a Saturday, so it's possible it was just volume and there was nothing good left.
The store is modern but not too deluxe in appearance, which is the direction Inserra has leaned in its new stores and remodels.
The bakery is pretty large, though, and in the back right corner.
We move on to seafood at the back of the grand aisle. It's an attractive setup.
Here we can see across the back wall of the store. Spacious, clean, full of stock, but not exactly exciting.
The grocery aisles are pretty straightforward, too.
There's a small service butcher on the back wall, with a nod to Patsy Inserra, the founder of the company.
It's really, really hard to beat ShopRite on center store in this area. They have the best combination of selection and pricing of any mainstream supermarket in New Jersey.
HABA is on the left side of the store. Inserra doesn't run any pharmacies anymore, after they closed all the pharmacies in their stores and new stores are not being built with them. Maybe 1/4-1/3 of the ShopRite stores are without pharmacies.
Back over to the back wall...
I'm finding once again that the interiors of these new stores don't have the ShopRite branding inside, instead using phrases like Inserra Supermarkets of Elmwood Park. I've mentioned before that it's possible that's to make it easy to rebrand the stores should Inserra (or Village, another member that hasn't been using the ShopRite name inside their stores much) decide to leave Wakefern, but I think that's extraordinarily unlikely. More likely, the members' names are used inside the store to make them feel local and independent rather than a big-chain name. The two primary competitors here in NJ -- ACME and Stop & Shop -- are totally devoid of any personality or charm 99% of the time.
But to be honest, I can't say this store is exactly what we'd describe as charming. It's attractive, modern, and well-run, but not exactly chock full of personality.
The front-end is expansive, with about half self-checkouts and half staffed checkouts...
That's all for this ShopRite, but don't forget to see the other posts we have today
here!
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