Shop Fair Supermarkets Opened: October 1, 2026 Owner: unknown Previous Tenants: Rite Aid Cooperative: Retail Grocers Group / General Trading Location: 2170 Frederick Douglass Blvd, Manhattan, NY Photographed: October 7, 2026 Welcome to Harlem, where a local group of stores has just opened one that's shiny and new! Emphasis on the shiny. More on that soon. Most of the Shop Fair stores I've posted recently are owned by Anibal Rodriguez, whose collection of supermarkets continues expanding. But the group of stores also has a number of other owners, and one of them owns this new Harlem store (I'm not entirely sure exactly who the owner is, though). This is a former Rite Aid, and it's around 15,000 square feet, although I also don't know exactly how large it is. For a long time, I got the sense that the Shop Fair and related Fine Fare stores were kind of just unremarkable, mostly not bad but not that interesting. Lately, though, the group's new openings have be...
Fine Fare Supermarkets Opened: October 7, 2026 Owner: Junior Frias Previous Tenants: Gristedes > Eckerd > Rite Aid Cooperative: Retail Grocers Group / General Trading Location: 21b Knolls Crescent, Bronx, NY Photographed: October 7, 2026 In case you hadn't noticed, there's a lot of new supermarkets in the New York metro area lately. By my completely unofficial count, more than 50 new supermarkets have opened in New York City alone in the past year or so, and the vast majority of those are independent grocers. Here's an example of a successful independent grocer opening a new store -- by simply moving next door into a former Rite Aid. Spuyten Duyvil, way up in the northwestern Bronx, has basically one retail strip, and you're looking at it. It looks like the anchor store was originally a Gristedes, later becoming a variety of drugstores before Rite Aid closed recently. In 1975, a small independent called Ben's Market opened up next door, and the original o...