Special Report: Checking Back in on Stop & Shop

We're back with another round of Stop & Shop updates. I first posed the question of "what's up with Stop & Shop" at the beginning of the month with a special report looking at stores in West Caldwell, Franklin Lakes, Wyckoff, Lyndhurst, Carlstadt, Hackensack, Dumont, South Orange, Union, Bayonne, Staten Island, Keyport, Aberdeen, and Berkeley Heights. Now it's time to check out a few other stores I've been to more recently -- and things are decidedly not good.

I don't have any substantive updates since the last post I made, which I linked above, but I have visited several more stores and not only have the stock and maintenance problems continued -- they have notably gotten worse. Still, again, there's a range of store conditions, and store ages. Let's see what's going on.

Closter, NJ

We begin our tour of Stop & Shop in Closter, New Jersey, a small town in northeastern New Jersey. It's just about three miles inland from the Hudson River and just about as far from the New York state border to the north. A former A&P of around 44,000 square feet is just outside of the middle of town, and things are feeling an awful lot like A&P did right about 10 years ago. The store isn't that large but feels massive and desolate because they're light on merchandise and shoppers for sure. I was there on a Thursday morning and it was almost eerily empty. The Whole Foods a couple blocks away wasn't packed but definitely had steady traffic in and out.

Closter, NJ

Shelves were empty and sparse all around, and the store itself is looking a little dated as it's gotten no updates whatsoever since the A&P days other than a quick paintjob in the transition period from A&P to Stop & Shop. The fixtures are dated (having last been updated... probably long before A&P closed). The freezers were loudly churning and when I used the men's room, the wall literally shook when I flushed the toilet.

Closter, NJ

Stock was light across the board, and the decor is (as we see) barebones. Notice the endcaps here in the natural food department in the front corner, where stock is light or just missing.

Closter, NJ

Another sign that this store is doing poorly -- the pharmacy closed and is now used as a staging area for the online shopping, but as we see the conversion was done with zero effort. The sign frame remains, just with the pharmacy lettering gone.

Closter, NJ

There are a few of the stores I've been to lately that, regardless of whether anything's gonna happen to Stop & Shop, won't make it in the long term. Closter is definitely on that list. Just to the north across the border in Orangeburg, New York, we find a gorgeous store that was only built in 2013, not that long ago. Beautiful though it is, it has all the same problems all the other ones had, starting in the produce department.

Orangeburg, NY

Mid-morning on a weekday, we have nearly empty bakery cases. Why is this?

Orangeburg, NY

Not far away in New City, the same problems come back again in the produce department.

New City, NY

What amazes me is how consistent the problems are across all the store. Here's Peekskill, a bit farther north on the east side of the Hudson.

Peekskill, NY

I don't think it's that the teams in the store don't care about their own stores, I think it's that they don't have the resources to keep them up the way they should. In every store I've visited (and it's now been almost three dozen stores across two states in the last two months), they're chronically short-staffed, with barely more people than you need to keep the lights on. If the stores aren't staffed, and they're not receiving the product they need, what can you do?

Peekskill, NY

In one Central Jersey store, I even overhead two department managers talking about the product shortages and, apparently, they're instructed not to face the product or fill spaces with other products (I gleaned from the brief conversation I heard, this is apparently coming from the store manager and perhaps that is coming from corporate).

Peekskill, NY

I simply can't imagine the stores would consistently be in this bad shape without something bigger coming. In a few of the stores, it really felt like we were counting down the days.

Baldwin Place, NY

The Stop & Shop in Baldwin Place, a small town about 10 miles outside of Peekskill, is practically next door from an A&P-turned-ACME in Mahopac which was empty of customers but absolutely pristine. I wondered if it was just that Stop & Shop's sales start on Friday and I was here on a Thursday, so they hadn't put out the sale items yet, but ACME's sales also start on Friday. Plus, I've visited stores across the region on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and I'm seeing the same thing.

Baldwin Place, NY

Baldwin Place was in particularly bad shape, with several large displays right at the entrance almost or completely empty. What's the excuse for this? Meanwhile, we go just a little bit farther into the produce department to find...

Baldwin Place, NY

An entire produce island, almost completely empty. There's a few dips on the front and two shelves of juice in the back. Why? This is extreme, something I only see when there's a recall or a snowstorm or a holiday or the like. Why does the store look like this on an average Thursday?

Baldwin Place, NY

In a few of the stores in New York, I saw people from SAS Retail Services doing inventory. It didn't seem they were doing anything other than counting the limited stock on the shelves, and I didn't see any evidence of a reset or something similar. I also assume this isn't a failing store, because it just got the latest renovation (which you can see a little bit in the pictures above). But the meat department was very thin in terms of stock...

Baldwin Place, NY

But talk about thin. How about this endcap?

Baldwin Place, NY

And HABA isn't looking much better. Again, it's feeling like they're having trouble filling the store, but at 64,000 square feet, this isn't exactly a massive superstore. It's large, for sure, but only 2,000 square feet larger than the ACME just up the street. It's obvious that the ACME is better-run. Neither felt particularly high-volume, though.

Baldwin Place, NY

Overall, the tiny store in the tiny town of Hopewell Junction was in excellent shape -- it was well-stocked and seemed to be taken care of rather well. But it's definitely a bad first impression...

Hopewell Junction, NY

The missing and poorly-replaced l and the tilted e and both Ss certainly don't make for an impressive entrance into the store. And although the store seems to be in good shape, it's not immune to the same problems all the other ones have...

Hopewell Junction, NY

Farther to the north, both Poughkeepsie stores seemed to be in pretty good condition, but the South Road location is way too big, with multiple aisles of not much. But at about 68,000 square feet, there's no reason this big chain should have trouble filling the space.

Poughkeepsie, NY - South Road

This store also has the "Taste & Time" decor, and while the store is in really good shape, it's just old. The other Poughkeepsie store is newly renovated, but the renovation was minimal. A few miles to the north, the store in Hyde Park is decidedly in worse shape.

Hyde Park, NY

It's a shame, because the Hyde Park store is beautiful and newly renovated, if rather boring. But it was in just terrible shape stock-wise...

Hyde Park, NY

There's no reason the produce shelves should look like this. Dairy is similarly a problem...

Hyde Park, NY

An entire frozen coffin case was nearly empty. This end was empty, and the two sides had a single layer of frozen pizzas covering the bottom.

Hyde Park, NY

Now we're jumping down to Central Jersey, where on Friday I went to four stores around New Brunswick (one of two in Edison, Piscataway, one of two in Somerset, and Kendall Park). I suspect that again, regardless of what happens to Stop & Shop big-picture, they're probably soon planning to pull out of this part of the state. In this area you have route 1 and Inman Ave in Edison, Piscataway, Easton Ave and route 27 in Somerset, Watchung, East Brunswick, Kendall Park, and Monroe. Then, to the west and south, the other stores I suspect are struggling are Pennington, Flemington, and Phillipsburg. Those stores all seem to be low-volume and generally neglected, and Pennington, Flemington, and Phillipsburg are truly on the edge of Stop & Shop's market area -- although not far from Giant in Pennsylvania. Of those stores, none have the current stoplight decor seen in Baldwin Place and Peekskill, none have the very bland decor they started using in 2018, one has the wood decor, one has the colorful fruitbowl decor like this, three have the yellow and purple decor, four have "Taste & Time", two have the Super Stop & Shop decor, and one (Piscataway) even still has Edwards decor. That means the most recent renovation happened around 2017 at the most recent, and most haven't been renovated since 2008. That, to me, feels like a region that is barely getting by. (Worth noting that just to the east, Stop & Shop seems to do just fine in the northern part of the Jersey Shore.) Meanwhile, multiple stores have closed in this region lately -- Dayton, Raritan, Highland Park, and Hillsborough -- suggesting that the whole area is struggling. Incidentally, Dayton and Raritan are still vacant, while Highland Park is soon to become a SuperFresh. My observations in the stores is pretty consistent with that assessment...

Edison, NJ - Inman Ave

The Inman Avenue store is an acquired Grand Union (edit: whoops, I was wrong -- it looks like a Grand Union but wasn't) that felt very pleasant and low-key, but definitely had stock problems. Rows of flower and plant displays outside the store were completely empty with these signs on them. Understandable, since we are just before the spring season. But the inside is sadly not that different...

Edison, NJ - Inman Ave

Grapes and peppers are apparently in short supply at Stop & Shop. Now, what's interesting to note is that these problems seem to be on top of the previous problems. Grapes and peppers were low at all the Central Jersey stores I went to -- one store even had a single orange bell pepper and a single yellow bell pepper, then maybe a dozen each of green and red -- but they're also having trouble with chicken broth, toothpaste, bottled water, deodorant, leafy greens, packaged salad mixes, meat, and all the other things we've been seeing since the beginning.

Edison, NJ - Inman Ave

Speaking of meat, the meat departments on a Friday afternoon were absolutely decimated at most of the stores I was at. I couldn't even take pictures of all the empty spaces on the shelves because there were just too many. Inman was alright, but in the other three, lots of meat and deli items were reduced for quick sale, which doesn't make me feel good about the amount of turnover they're getting.

Edison, NJ - Inman Ave

Another bad sign in what seems to be an otherwise well-run store? The meat counter was completely empty. It's one thing to not have an employee always standing by the counter; it's another thing completely to have it entirely empty.

Edison, NJ - Inman Ave

Eggs were also thin at a few of the places I visited. Here it seems to be a problem specific to certain types and brands, but I have a hard time taking it in isolation from the rest of the stock issues I see. That's the thing -- if I walked into my ACME or ShopRite or fill in the blank of another supermarket chain, and noticed that the bell peppers were pretty much cleaned out, I would chalk it up to a bad week or a drought making the crop yields too small, or whatever. But when you see these problems so consistently across the entire chain (or at least the southern parts, as I haven't been able to get to Connecticut, Rhode Island, or Massachusetts in quite some time), I find it hard to believe there isn't something bigger happening around here.

Edison, NJ - Inman Ave

Piscataway is just up the street from where a ShopRite is moving into a new-build store (it's right on the border, so right now the store is in Piscataway and they're moving just across to South Plainfield). I have to imagine this massive but empty store is just waiting until the ShopRite opens to close. The store retains its 1990s Edwards decor, and is in rather bad shape. While it's clean and generally nice, the service departments are down to the bare minimum with large stretches of things that used to be service counters or refrigerators replaced with rows and rows of shelving of random items. Much of the deli case is empty and there are sale displays and small portable drink refrigerators and the like pushed up in front of the deli case.

Piscataway, NJ

And the stock in perishables is so thin I have to assume they're not doing any business. I've been to this store twice now and both times it has been absolutely deserted. It's a shame.

Piscataway, NJ

We see the same problems again and again, with the boxes of greens and the organic vegetables...

Piscataway, NJ

...but we have new problems this week, too, like apparently dish soap. It was really thin in this store and in at least one other.

Piscataway, NJ

Piscataway's meat department was empty, too. Big spaces on a lot of the shelves.

Piscataway, NJ

Remember how I said several of those Central Jersey stores still have the "Taste & Time" decor? I actually really like that decor package, aside from the terrible slogans (they really couldn't come up with anything better than "Oven & More" for bakery?), but maintenance is just pathetic in some of those stores. The Easton Avenue store, a 75,000 square foot hulking superstore just next to an even larger abandoned Kmart, is in terrible repair and truly feels like a store about to go out of business. I mean, just look at how many lights are burnt out in the grand aisle -- which honestly otherwise is pretty attractive.

Somerset, NJ - Easton Ave

It's really embarrassing that Stop & Shop has any stores looking like this, let alone dozens or more. There's simply no excuse for such a large chain to have these problems, other than the obvious explanation that they're seriously struggling and might be soon to close, sell, or otherwise rethink a large number of stores.

Somerset, NJ - Easton Ave

Most of the stores that had salad bars or the like closed them during the coronavirus and never reopened them. This one had a tiny section of the salad bar now stocked with olives, but the rest stocked with random deli items and lots of Gatorade. Again, there were too many spaces in the meat department to actually photograph them all. (Plus, this store was so deserted that four or so employees were just standing around in the grand aisle, and they had not much better to do than watch me, so I didn't want to seem too suspicious.)

Somerset, NJ - Easton Ave

But this store might have been in the worst shape of them all. Big sections in various aisles were just confusing, with empty spaces filled with the most random of merchandise, or nothing at all.

Somerset, NJ - Easton Ave

Bottled water is practically all gone here. You can't tell me this is simply too high volume for them to keep it in stock. The store had absolutely no customers. And I didn't get to the other location in Somerset, but it sounds like it might be similar.

Somerset, NJ - Easton Ave

Chicken broth remains a problem. Hard to see here, but quite a few of the rows are only one or two deep.

Somerset, NJ - Easton Ave

Some sections were almost laughable, such as this part of the baby and toy aisle. What the heck is there even supposed to be here?!

Somerset, NJ - Easton Ave

The natural food department was gone too, with random snacks and such filling the space. This is the type of thing we might expect to see in a declining low-income urban store, at least stereotypically, but the irony is that the most urban store I was at recently is the one in North Elizabeth on the border between Elizabeth and Newark, and it was absolutely spotless and perfectly maintained. Meanwhile, here in Franklin Township, median household income is over $110,000.

Somerset, NJ - Easton Ave

The HABA department truly resembled a store that's set to close or perhaps a store right before a major storm.

Somerset, NJ - Easton Ave

What's ridiculous is that the Fairfield Avenue store in Bridgeport was in better shape when I visited about eight weeks before it was set to close.

Somerset, NJ - Easton Ave

This store is huge, and it's obvious it's too big for Stop & Shop. But I think the bigger problem is that Stop & Shop is having clear trouble running stores of any size. How much longer can this go on?

Somerset, NJ - Easton Ave

I mused a bit on the possible fate of Stop & Shop on my last post. Would it be spun off? Would the southern region stores be sold or closed? They already pulled out of New Jersey once in the early 1980s. But these days, they have a far bigger presence and there are way fewer competitors -- back in the 80s, ShopRite was big but not as huge as they are now, ACME was around, but so were Grand Union, Pathmark, A&P, and a far larger number of independents and small chains, including a large number of Foodtowns that would nearly all close or sell -- many of them, eventually to Stop & Shop. These days, New Jersey is ShopRite territory, with significant presence by Stop & Shop and ACME. ALDI, LIDL, and a few Save-A-Lots and Grocery Outlets have the low end of the market locked down; Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Uncle Giuseppe's, Food Bazaar, Livoti's -- they each have their niche. Urban communities have their various Key Food, Krasdale, and Retail Grocers-type stores, while operators from H Mart to Patel Brothers, 99 Ranch Market to Apna Bazar cover pretty much all of Asia. But how many mainstream supermarkets are around? ShopRite for sure, Wegmans, and more ACMEs than you can shake a stick at, but other than a few random Foodtowns, IGAs, and other independents, what else is out there? Who would be able to take on this number of stores? I'll just say this, if Stop & Shop closes any significant number of stores, we might be getting a lot more ACMEs, or maybe a surprise visit from someone like Northeast Grocery or whichever other chain appears in your wildest dreams. And Grocery Outlet will have a field day.

Somerset, NJ - Easton Ave

But how does a store like this even survive? It's obvious something is going on here. The store's stock doesn't get this depleted by normal business and sales.

Somerset, NJ - Easton Ave

The Kendall Park store was in pretty good shape -- it's the only supermarket in its area -- but is way too large at over 80,000 square feet. Some category problems...

Kendall Park, NJ

...and of course, the toothpaste was low. But nobody's shopping here! When I was here, there were two registers open and five self-checkouts. Other than me buying exactly two packages of cat food, there was one other customer checking out. How do these stores even stay in business?

Kendall Park, NJ

You can see just how large and overly spacious the store feels...

Kendall Park, NJ

I mentioned on the last post that we might find out just exactly what's going on by May, when the Ahold Delhaize CEO said there will be further public details. But in some of these stores, I feel like they'll barely be able to even make it to May. Seriously, if the stock shortages seem to be compounding week over week, how much longer will it be until the shortages are so serious people simply stop shopping at the stores? Has that already happened, judging by how empty the stores all seem to be? I know for a fact similar issues are happening in at least one Massachusetts store, and up in Trumbull, CT (near Bridgeport), residents have started a petition for Stop & Shop to improve its operations. It's frustrating not knowing, but I don't have any magical inside information here. I wish I could tell what was going on, but my best guess this moment, if I were forced? Stop & Shop as we know it is counting down its last days. Maybe not the whole chain, but I simply can't understand how a collection of stores so obviously unprofitable and neglected as the New Jersey and southern New York stores can go on. Anyway, if you don't read RetailWatchers, you may want to check out some of the recent discussion on the Stop & Shop forum. I doubt there's an impending implosion of Ahold Delhaize USA, but a big shakeup seems likely.