The Market Report

ShopRite of East Orange Owner:  Village Super Market Opened:  1987 Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  Wakefern Food Corp. Location:  533 Main St, East Orange, NJ Photographed:  July 2020 In busy downtown locations, it's now the hot trend to construct a mixed-use development, with retail on the ground floor and offices or residences above. But back in the 1980s, developers thought it would just be fine and dandy to plop a giant suburban-style strip mall in the middle of an urban downtown. Having been in East Orange since the early 1950s, Village Super Market (whose original location was just over in South Orange) was a natural choice to open a 56,000 square foot ShopRite anchoring the plaza at the Brick Church train station. By 2019, it was announced that the complex was to be demolished for... you guessed it... a mixed use development. The new development is slated to include a supermarket with a smaller footprint, but it's unclear whether Village will

Save-A-Lot Opened:  2018 Previous Tenants:  none Location:  200 Central Ave, City of Orange, NJ Photographed:  June 2020 After making way too many wrong turns in Orange in my attempt to get through to the City Supermarket in Newark (for my own food shopping, not blog coverage -- which we had way back in November 2017 ), I stumbled across the newly built Orange Save-A-Lot, opened in 2018. Sorry but this store model is just ugly. Way too plain and absolutely nothing eye-catching, especially for a downtown location like this. And the interior doesn't look much better . Don't worry, the rest of the Orange and East Orange stores are much more exciting! We have a bodega about five blocks east along Central Avenue tomorrow over on The Independent Edition .

CTown Supermarkets Owner:  Vishnu Patel / Universal Food Markets Opened:  1998 Previous Tenants:  Good Deal Cooperative:  Krasdale Location:  16-26 N Day St, City of Orange, NJ Photographed:  December 2018 & August 2019 We're here in downtown Orange to visit this former Good Deal. I suspect that the store was taken over by a different CTown owner in the late 80s or early 90s, before being sold to Universal Food Markets in 1998. Unfortunately, this store more closely resembles the Universal we toured in Paterson than the last CTown stores we saw in Paterson or Passaic . This nighttime photo from a December 2018 visit might as well be from December 1978. This is one of the most oddly-oriented stores I've ever visited, with the storefront facing neither the street nor the municipal parking lot in the back, instead facing this small and very dark alley. There is no way to walk from the street to the entrance without walking in the driveway since ther

Whole Foods Market Opened:  ca. 2005 Previous Tenants:  Pathmark Location:  235 Prospect Ave, West Orange, NJ Photographed:  June & September 2016 and December 2020 In this unnamed shopping mall just up the street from the larger and busier Essex Green Mall, which contains West Orange's ShopRite , we find a rather odd combination of a Whole Foods and a Kmart (which closed in 2020). It makes a lot more sense when we learn that the 66,000 square foot junior anchor space was previously a Pathmark. The store underwent a renovation in late 2016, and I have a full tour from June 2016 before the renovation started along with some pictures from September 2016 when it was in progress. The renovation was fairly minor, replacing the decor that seemed perfectly fine to me with new decor that seems equally fine to me. We're going to tour the store, then revisit it in December of 2020 for post-remodel pictures. Okay, except for one thing that did really change