Fine Fare Supermarkets - Union City, NJ (33rd St)

Fine Fare Supermarkets

Opened: 2010

Owner: Ramon Urena

Previous Tenants: A&P (1940s-late 1970s) > Met Foodmarkets (opened ca. late 1970s) > Super Supermarket (ca. mid-1990s - 2010)

Cooperative: Retail Grocers Group/General Trading

Location: 426 33rd St, Union City, NJ

Photographed: March 6, 2026

Before we begin, just a heads up: this was originally posted in April 2018, but was rewritten with new photos in September 2026. Now for the post! Okay, let's get back in that early-2018 mindset for a second. The Market Report wasn't even called The Market Report yet, as the blog was still NJ Supermarkets. And I was deep in posting my visits to around two dozen grocery stores in the West New York - Union City - North Bergen area. In fact, I even made a map of all the stores we were going to back then...

So generally, we visited these stores from north to south, ending here at the 33rd Street Fine Fare. As you can see, this store is very close to both the City Fresh Market and La Despensa del Ahorro. Now, Union City actually has two Fine Fares, and the other is across town to the south on 4th Street. This one is actually the smaller of the two, measuring around 7500 square feet (there's probably more in a basement, though). It's a seriously old-school supermarket -- in fact, it was constructed as an A&P in roughly the mid-1940s. A&P stuck around here into the 1970s, converting it to an A&P WEO (Where Economy Originates) location in 1972 before closing it around the end of that decade. By 1980, it was open as a Met Foodmarket, and while I'm not exactly sure what happened to Met, it does look like it had become part of the local Super Supermarkets chain by the late 1990s. Super sold the store in 2010 to a Fine Fare operator.

The store looks like it faces the parking lot, which is in the back of the building, but in a holdover from the early A&P days it's actually oriented to face 33rd Street. So the registers run along 33rd Street on the wall you can see above, with produce in the first aisle on the right side. Dairy and cold cuts are at the back, with the meat department, deli, and frozen in the last aisle on the left side. There's a small alcove in the front-left corner with soda and snacks that appears to have been an expansion at some point.

This store has gotten some updates over the years, but inside it feels really dated. You don't have to look any further than the patchwork floor to get the sense that it's been quite a while since the last major renovation (my guess is that Super Supermarket redid the store before moving in back in the 90s). In fact, the aisle markers have Fine Fare stickers affixed over the Super Supermarket logo.

The store has gotten some minor renovation since my original set of 2017 pictures (which were so blurry and generally bad that I haven't included any here so far). But the produce aisle used to be double-wide, with a few wooden display tables in the middle. Now, only the front part has that, and you can see in the picture above that the aisle marker for aisle 1 actually spans the first and second aisle. Below is an idea from 2017 of how it was previously set up...

And now back to the 2026 pictures.

This store isn't particularly dirty or in truly terrible shape, but you can see in these pictures that it's starting to really show its age. To me, it looked much better back in 2017. Now, it's really dated.

Still, it's seen some updates, such as the installation of these new meat and deli cases in the last aisle along the left-side wall of the store.

Beverages and snacks are in the alcove on the left side of the store just in front of the meat department.

And a look at the front-end...

Outside the store around the back, though, there's a real surprise that's a treat for someone like me. What we're looking at here is a circa-1940s A&P "Super Market" sign that was standard-issue on stores like this back when it opened, and was used from the late 1930s until roughly the mid- to late-1950s. And what that means is that probably this sign has been on the back of this store since day one back in the mid-1940s or so. Truly incredible that it's still here -- and that the space has been a supermarket for that long with basically no interruptions!

That brings us to the end of this very fun store, but you can see all the Union City, West New York, and Guttenberg stores here. Keep an eye out for several additional posts with updated pictures!

This post was rewritten on September 8, 2026 with new photos.