TOUR: ShopRite - Cedar Knolls, NJ

ShopRite of Greater Morristown

Owner: Robert Sumas / Village Super Market

Opened: 2013

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: Wakefern Food Corp.

Location: 178 E Hanover Ave, Cedar Knolls, Hanover, NJ

Photographed: July 2016

The 78,000 square foot flagship Village ShopRite finally comes to the blog five and a half years after I initially photographed it! And because these were early pictures on a long-ago iPhone, please excuse the picture quality; I'll have to go back to redo this tour at some point. Designed to counter the planned Wegmans nearby in Parsippany, this gigantic store replaced the much smaller and 1970s-era Morris Plains ShopRite in 2013. This was the first generation of Village Food Garden stores; Stirling and Livingston were the other two and Union opened at the same but was never branded with VFG.

This store's layout is fairly standard for Village but just rotated 90 degrees. The right side wall of the store is the front-end, so we enter to pharmacy/wellness center (the later Village Wellness Garden concept hadn't been developed yet at the time of this store) to the right, and customer service is straight ahead at the end of an island that forms the inside of the grand aisle. Produce, deli, and pizza line the front wall of the store, with bakery, floral, liquor, seafood, the Diner, and barbecue extending along the island behind customer service. In the front left corner of the store we have an indoor/outdoor seating area that is now home to a bar, Bin 37, and a coffee shop. From there, the store is a very familiar Village setup, with meat lining the side wall and frozen/dairy at the far back, and an aisle splitting the grocery aisles in half -- just like Elizabeth, Garwood, and so on.

Here's what we see upon entering -- the bakery department, seen here, is the beginning of an island that separates the grand aisle from the grocery aisles. The grocery aisles are behind this wall.

The Wellness Center is to the right upon entering, with pharmacy on the first floor and a second floor with a dietitian's office, a fitness studio, and a community room.

Now heading over for a closeup of the bakery...

I've discussed Village's variable bread placement before (moving it in many stores from bakery to deli in this era of remodels). I'm not sure if I have a good picture of it, but bread here gets its very own counter in the middle of the grand aisle.

Now turning 90 degrees to look out over the entire grand aisle...

Produce takes up the front corner of the grand aisle. Much like in the Village stores that are really deep but not wide (Elizabeth, Garwood), produce is wider but shallow, with other perishables behind it.

The interesting thing about this store is that it's much wider than it is deep, and the parking lot runs along the wall behind produce here, not the wall past the registers (which is the right-side wall here).

Floral and then liquor are opposite produce behind bakery, which is a somewhat unusual place to put them. I guess Elizabeth and Garwood used to have floral here, and this is the only Village ShopRite with liquor (...is that true?), so there's no standard placement for that.

We can see the aisle that divides the store in half between the liquor department and the oyster bar. Last I was at the store (which was years ago), the oyster bar had been eliminated and used as an expansion for the weirdly small seafood counter; the idea of serving things at a bar was relocated down to Bin 37 in the seating area.

By now, we've seen many of these signs in older and less deluxe stores that have been renovated, but this was the store for which this design package was designed.

And somewhere in the middle here is the island featuring cheese and bread...

Up next, the deli and pizzeria are on the front wall. Livingston also had a pizzeria, although it was removed a few years after being installed. Shame too, because the pizza was excellent.

Self-service food bars line the middle of this part of the grand aisle, which makes up the Village Food Garden.

The diner and Mr. Perry's Smokehouse, a reference to Perry Sumas (a past owner of Village Super Market) are next to seafood on the opposite side of the grand aisle, with another island for subs and sushi in the middle.

Fantastic signage in this area, which I believe was done by Broden Design Group. The newer Village stores are done by Off the Wall.

Looking back to the right side of the grand aisle, where the entrance is.

An overview of the sushi/sub island, along with the cafe registers on the front wall and the exit to the patio seating area straight ahead.

I don't have a picture of the seating area, unfortunately, but it's quite deluxe. Here's a picture from Village Super Market.

Butcher and packaged meats line the left side wall of the store.

The rest of the store is fairly normal for Village ShopRites, except for the middle aisle. In Elizabeth, it might be used for displaying big dump bins of sale merchandise, but here it's branded the Co-Op Market displaying a random selection of complete junk to high-end homegoods. Not a fan.

The right half of the first aisle, behind customer service/bakery/floral/liquor, is an additional aisle of liquor.

HABA also is in the first few aisles.

Not a whole lot you can do, of course, in the grocery aisles to continue the marketplace atmosphere of the grand aisle. But they are quite attractive, and the skylights allow a lot of natural light to come into the store which otherwise is light on windows.

But we do see the full Milk Store signage extending all the way to the ceiling here!

This sign, by the way, is not just a slogan or a name some design firm came up with -- it's the actual dairy farm that produces Wakefern's private label dairy and eggs, Readington Farms. That's down in Hunterdon County, and the closest ShopRite to the farm is the Branchburg location. There are two other supermarkets in Whitehouse/Readington, which we'll be touring when we get to Hunterdon County.

Frozen and dairy take up the last two aisles at the back of the store.

Bread is also back here, on the back wall of the store.

At the back end of the store we have the ShopRite from Home department, as well as an entrance and exit for the overflow parking on the side and back of the store. Note that there are only 10 aisles in total, but because of the setup, it's as much as 20 aisles in your average supermarket.

Here's the gigantic front-end from the front of the store, and you can also see the customer service counter opposite. Great old pictures of Village ShopRites take up a lot of space on the front wall...

Taking a look here, we have South Orange above register 17, Chatham (which still looks basically the same) between 16 and 15, Morristown above 15, and an unknown location above 14 (I don't recognize that one, does anyone else?). For some close-ups...

Chatham and Morristown. I have no idea what interior is shown on the bottom here, since the interiors have changed a lot more than the exteriors.

Not sure about this interior shot either. But how about that striped front wall! Also seems the first digit of the number has been removed -- accidental or not, isn't that a strange way to say it? Wouldn't you say "since 1937" instead of "for over XX years" so that you never have to update the sign? I mean, technically it's true that Village has been around for over 5 years, but I don't think that's what they were going for...

And here we see the exit at the front of the store. Well, that wraps up this very long store tour, but if you can't get enough supermarkets for the day, check out the recently-closed ACME to the west here, and the closed Foodtown to the east here. Tomorrow, we head east within Hanover Township for an independent store over on The Independent Edition!