ShopRite of Garwood
Opened: 2001
Owner: Village Super Market
Previous Tenants: none
Cooperative: Wakefern Food Corp.
Location: 563 North Ave E, Garwood, NJ
Photographed: June 4, 2025
Before we begin, just a heads up: this was originally posted in December 2017, but was rewritten with new photos in September 2026. Now for the post! Welcome to the Garwood ShopRite! Opened in 2001 but planned as far back as 1995, it's almost identical in layout to the
Elizabeth ShopRite a couple towns over. Both are owned by Village Super Market, one of the larger Wakefern members and a company based just a few miles away in Springfield. For years, this Garwood ShopRite was the spiffier cousin while the Elizabeth store languished with its very 1990s decor (think black and white checkerboard everywhere). Now, Elizabeth has gotten a total overhaul, and this store's circa-2010 decor has seen better days. That's not to say it's not a nice store, but that it's definitely approaching the time it'll need a redo.
We enter to the grand aisle on the right side of the store. Bakery is in the front-right corner, with seafood and deli lining the rest of the right-side wall (in Elizabeth, the deli comes first and then seafood, but here it's the reverse). Produce and floral are opposite, with part of the meat department in the back. The rest of the meat department lines the back wall, with dairy and frozen on the left side. It's a long and narrow store, so there's only 10 aisles here but they're split in half front to back. The supermarket totals around 61,000 square feet, just slightly smaller than the 65,000 or so of the Elizabeth location.
There was almost nobody shopping in the store when I visited, which you can clearly see in the pictures. I don't know what business is like these days -- I used to live closer to this store and go more frequently -- but last I heard, it still gets very busy at other times.
This store offers a good look at this circa-2010 decor package, which has mostly been removed from other stores as they're renovated. (I have to imagine it's only a matter of time here, too.)
Floral is in an island between produce and meat, the same place it was in Elizabeth prior to its recent renovation. Now, it's been moved out to the entrance foyer in Elizabeth.
The store is narrow enough that the back wall isn't sufficiently wide to accommodate the entire meat department, just a service counter and a few cases. The rest is in the first aisle opposite seafood and deli, behind produce.
The grocery aisles are set up very much like Elizabeth. Many of the fixtures here are likely original to this store's construction, but a handful have been replaced, including the black dairy cases you can see in the picture below to the left.
A look from the last aisle back to the first aisle down the middle dividing aisle. This store is deep enough that each half aisle is as long as a regular supermarket's aisle, so splitting them is definitely necessary.
Updated freezers here...
...and it looks like older dairy cases with new doors in the last aisle. As you can see, the decor kind of peters out here at this end of the store. In the front-left corner, there used to be a pharmacy, which closed around 2021. It hasn't been replaced with anything, but this is one of the less-noticeable examples of covering up a pharmacy.
When do you ever see a ShopRite this empty? I was here on a weekday afternoon, so I wasn't expecting big crowds, but it still struck me as strangely deserted. I'll have to return to see if it gets busier at a different time. That's all for now, but I'll be back if this store ever does get a remodel like Elizabeth, and so many other Village locations!
This post was rewritten on September 8, 2026 with new photos.
I actually used to go to this store frequently when I was little-- we lived in Westfield back then and this, along with the SR in Clark, was our grocery store of choice. It helped that my grandma knew one of the managers here, and for whatever reason, gave us the first Harry Potter movie on VHS (though we gave most of our tapes away years ago). Sadly, I don't remember much of what the store looked like, and it seems the flat-screen TV they used to have in the deli or thereabouts has been taken out; from what I recall, they displayed ads and stuff, with a news ticker sourced from Reuters along the bottom. We moved out near Hackettstown around 2004 (since the Westfield property taxes were insanely high), and nowadays we mostly patronize the SR in Mansfield (even despite its' crappy parking, though with a recent expansion and reset, my dad's gotten frustrated over not being able to find anything and he's pondered shopping at the Weis across the road instead). The nearest Village SR is down in Washington on Route 31; we've only gone there a couple times but it has this exact decor and it's HUGE (my dad doesn't like it because they split the aisles up to make you buy more stuff); the A&P down 31 kept trying to fight it but didn't succeeded and went down with the chain (and Acme didn't buy it, probably sensing futility; ironic, considering the old Washington Acme on Route 57 is still vacant, complete with old decor!).
ReplyDeleteAwesome! By split aisles, do you mean split with a front part and a back part? Because Garwood is set up the same way, and so is Elizabeth. These stores are all deeper than they are wide, so it makes sense. I know someone who used to shop at the A&P and is not thrilled with the new ShopRite, which he says doesn't always carry the same selection of items that A&P did. Competing with ShopRite is always hard, but competing with ShopRite in a relatively sparsely populated area is near impossible.
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