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Update: Food Bazaar Supermarket - Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY

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By Zachary

Food Bazaar Supermarket
Owner: Spencer An
Opened: September 6, 2024
Previous Tenants: Pathmark (1970-2015) > Stop & Shop (2015-2024)
Location: 2965 Cropsey Ave, Coney Island/Gravesend, Brooklyn, NY
Photographed: October 7, 2024
Today we're returning to the Coney Island Food Bazaar, the first store they converted from Stop & Shop back in September. After a hectic first day, over the next several weeks the store was reset and has begun a renovation. Although it's still in progress, it's starting to look much more like a Food Bazaar. Still, some of the work has exposed the aging facility that will probably need a lot of work over time.
Starting outside, the 45,000 square foot store has gotten a minor renovation on the front. The sidewalk has been re-poured, with some posts installed separating it from the parking lot. The building and facade have been painted, and of course, Food Bazaar signage has been installed. While the exterior looks fresh and much better than in the Stop & Shop days, it's still not great. The facade is clean and nicely painted, but extremely plain. The signage is fine, but the awkward ghost of the Pathmark shape remains (and it doesn't look like there are any plans to change that). Heading inside, the store is looking much better but still is going to need a lot of work.
Right away, we can see the flooring has been pulled up to switch to polished concrete, which is standard for Food Bazaar. (See this Bridgeport location, also a former Stop & Shop.) The walls have all been painted Food Bazaar's usual beige, which you can also see in those pictures of Bridgeport. And the ceiling has been painted dark brown, again in standard Food Bazaar fashion. But the renovation (at least so far) seems to be strictly cosmetic inside. The fixtures all remain from Stop & Shop, and there's no signs that the layout will be changed. Of course, that all still could happen. There's still no service bakery department but they are baking some items in-store. There's a bakery prep area behind the wall to the right above. I have no idea why this area isn't set up as a standard service counter, but that's a choice that dates back to the Pathmark days. In that front corner, Pathmark (and, at first, Stop & Shop) had a pharmacy.
The grocery aisles have been reset to more closely resemble the standard product mix at a Food Bazaar. (In the conversions, the idea is simply to get products out as quickly as possible, so it's frequently a more minimal product mix than your average Food Bazaar. They then seem to be adding products over time.)
But the grocery shelving, conspicuously, remains from Stop & Shop. It's hard to tell if that'll be changed. I think the fixtures look a bit better in the pictures than they did in person. In person, they were noticeably old and beat-up. This store doesn't (yet?) have beer, and the former beer refrigerator has been filled with water and other drinks.
Obviously, the store is still under construction. But it hasn't changed much yet. The grocery aisles look better, but similar. The aisle markers from Stop & Shop remain, but they were in the process of being replaced. More on that shortly. The shelving also dates back to the Pathmark days, and you can compare it to what Food Bazaar is putting in new and renovated stores here.
I can only assume the seafood department's setup is temporary. It feels haphazard and the patchy concrete floor (which has yet to be polished in most of the store) doesn't help. Notice the tarp hanging from the ceiling on the left, which clearly indicates work is still ongoing.
I'd be surprised if Food Bazaar doesn't ultimately take out an aisle or two to expand the produce department, which is again very obviously smaller than the average Food Bazaar produce department. Compare this setup to those in the Myrtle and Gates locations, both of which are smaller than this one.
Notice, too, the Pathmark tile flooring that remains in most of the produce aisle.
And speaking of Pathmark tile, check out the backsplash on the seafood department. Definitely left over from Pathmark.
In the meat department, the store's appearance has been cleaned up a bit but the fixtures all remain. I assume these will be replaced soon enough. I'd be very surprised if Food Bazaar didn't add a butcher counter here, which the store currently doesn't have.
Asian and kosher foods. You can get a glimpse of the new aisle markers above and below, and more on that shortly.
Some category signage is in, but no wall decor yet. I don't know how elaborate the decor will be here.
Here we can get a sense of the aisle markers. Notice the new aisle markers being hung in front of the old Stop & Shop signs, many of which were wrong anyway because the store had been reset.
Deli in the back-left corner.
Again, we see fixtures in need of replacement. The freezers were clearly leaking here. Again, my assumption is that it'll all be updated soon enough (given the standards I see at other Food Bazaar stores), but we'll see.
The store seemed rather busy on a Monday afternoon, not exactly a peak shopping time. This is the largest supermarket in the immediate neighborhood, so there's a bit of a built-in market.
Again, we can see some funny business with random fixtures such as the black and white refrigerators apparently just stitched together on the right.
This store has gotten a lot of negative reviews on Google Maps and social media, mostly focused on the prices. Carlstadt has, very consistently, gotten the same complaints. (Hempstead seems to not so much, and I don't fully know why. Piscataway only opened on Friday, so I'm hesitant to ascribe too much significance to reactions there.) Part of the problem is that, quite simply, Food Bazaar's center-store and dairy/frozen pricing is significantly higher than Stop & Shop and that they have far fewer storebrand choices than Stop & Shop did. On the other hand, their perishables tend to be much better and cheaper than Stop & Shop, but the acquired Stop & Shop stores don't have a full perimeter just yet the way most Food Bazaars do. Part of the problem is also the conversion process: Food Bazaar started with mostly leftover stock from Stop & Shop, minus the storebrands. Those items are naturally going to be higher-priced with fewer low-priced options, skewing the overall prices much higher. When storebrands come in later, the average price level might come down but people have already developed their understanding of the store's prices. If Food Bazaar wants to be taken seriously in areas with much more competition like the New Jersey suburbs, they will need to seriously lower their prices on center-store, and/or position the stores much more upscale with higher-end services and offerings. I know Food Bazaar is generally a really good operator, so I'm sure they have a strategy, but so far they seem to be alienating a lot of customers. While I don't have any scientific method of tracking grocery prices, I do regularly do my own comparisons between various New Jersey stores including Food Bazaar, and the vast majority of the time, Food Bazaar, Stop & Shop, ACME, and ShopRite are all within a few dollars of each other on a basket of around $100.
The front-end is looking much more like a Food Bazaar than a Stop & Shop these days, with the trellis-type structure installed over the registers.
And here we can see the new aisle markers in at the front. Given their positioning with the light fixture, I wonder if the lighting is set to be replaced here, too. Why else would you hang the aisle markers like that?
I'll be back to this and the other Food Bazaar stores as the renovations progress, and check out my visit to Piscataway!
Don't miss this weekend's other stops too!
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Comments

  1. SteveOctober 20, 2024 at 4:03 PM

    The bakery does not have ovens. It was a “cold spot” bakery. Relatively common in Pathmark’s older stores, fresh bread delivered daily and everything else frozen.

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