The Market Report

Our next group of stores will take us the next week or so and will have us returning to Manhattan! I should note that we've already seen many stores in Manhattan, and the other thing that people who are familiar with New York City will notice: my "southern Manhattan" is more accurately the southern half, i.e. everything south of Harlem. We'll more specifically be covering stores in the Financial District, Chelsea, Lenox Hill, and the Upper West Side. We start tomorrow on The Independent Edition!

Our last stop on Staten Island before going back up to Manhattan (for the last time!) is this approximately 6300 square foot supermarket. Operating until early 2020 as a Top Tomato Superstore, this and one other location on Forest Avenue were converted to Associated Fresh. I'm assuming ownership changed as well, but that's hard to confirm. Like the Market Fresh we saw, Forest Avenue was previously a Walgreens.
This store, more than the other Top Tomato, has the feeling of a small specialty market. You enter to produce and meat on the right side of the store, with two grocery aisles in a small expansion out the front wall (visible in the exterior photograph). To the left is the deli/bakery on the back wall, with a few small aisles in front and dairy/frozen on the far left side.
This store tends to lean into the specialty Italian territory, as Top Tomato did. But you can also buy basic grocery items.
Oh yeah. That's a little bit of pasta, wouldn't you say?
Second aisle …

Just shy of half a mile from yesterday's ShopRite is this Western Beef, which opened as a Waldbaum's. Around 2005, when Waldbaum's closed, Western Beef moved into the 52,000 square foot space from its older location to the west on Forest Avenue. Today, that property now holds a Harbor Freight Tools.
Western Beef's entrance is at the far left end of the storefront, leading shoppers into a spacious produce department. (This store has to be one of the largest Western Beef locations out there.) Deli is in an island that runs along the right side of the produce aisle, with seafood at the back of the first aisle and meat in a walk-in cooler along the back wall. Frozen is in the second-to-last aisle with dairy in the last aisle and bakery in the back corner.
Oh yeah, something about this store -- it's one of the brightest supermarkets I've ever been in. I returned to the store a while after photographing it to do some shopping at night, and it's positively blindi…

This 60,000 square foot ShopRite, which is owned by Kevin Mannix, is located at the corner of east-west artery Forest Avenue and north-south artery Richmond Avenue. We've previously seen a Key Food way east on Forest Ave.
The store has recently gotten a simple exterior renovation, along with the rest of the mall it's in. Here's what it previously looked like.
Oddly enough, the store has SRS (Wakefern's corporately owned stores division) decor inside, which we can see here, though there are differences such as the flooring and aisle markers. Some departments seem to have gotten simple decor upgrades. That's about all for this store, come back tomorrow to tour this store's biggest competitor!

Photographed July 2018