TOUR: H Mart - Elkins Park, PA

H Mart

Owner: Il Yeon Kwon

Opened: unknown

Previous Tenants: unknown

Location: 7320 Old York Rd, Elkins Park, PA

Photographed: July 22, 2021

It's time to move on from Philadelphia! We're about half a mile from the city limits to check out this H Mart, which is only about a mile and a half from the new one in Philadelphia. In fact, I'm a little surprised that store wasn't intended to replace this one, given its subpar location, size, and age. I'm unclear exactly how large this store is but I would estimate it's in the 20,000 square foot range. It's hard to tell, though, because like Cherry Hill, it's tucked away in the basement of this shopping mall.

This store feels slightly smaller than Cherry Hill, but I'm not sure if that's true. This was likely the first H Mart in the Philadelphia area, but again, I'm not certain of that. I suppose it's possible this was previously a different, older supermarket that H Mart bought out more recently than I had thought.

The mall's facade was redone around 2010. Here's what it looked like before.

We enter the building and go straight down to the basement to enter the supermarket. Unlike some of the modern stores designed for two levels, you never forget you're in a basement here. The whole store is dim, cramped, and crowded.

And, the ceiling is both low and uneven. It's not exactly the most appealing store interior we've seen, but it's certainly not bad. It's maintained well, but needs some serious work. I can see H Mart closing or replacing this location in the near future, especially since as I mentioned with Cherry Hill, there are fewer and fewer of these outdated H Marts.

But as we see, the store is nicely stocked and packed with plenty of perishables, so it must do a pretty good business. I was here around 6:30 pm on a Thursday, so not exactly a peak shopping time for this store's customers.

Some signage has been updated, such as these here, and in fact I didn't really see any older department signage or anything of the sort, likely because the ceilings are too low to have any real signage. Some fixtures have been updated, too.

Service seafood in the back corner of the store. The meat department runs along the rest of the back wall...

And each grocery aisle, while well-stocked and clean, feels so closed in because of the low ceilings and high shelving.

In fact, aisle markers have to be mounted on the beams rather than hung from the ceiling. Like the department signage I pointed out earlier, these seem to be designed to match the latest decor package, as seen in Philadelphia, so they may have done some quick updates to this store at the same time Philadelphia opened.

Because the store is deep and narrow, the aisles are split in half from front to back.

Again, there have been some updates (such as the case seen below, which again matches the latest decor package) but many fixtures have not been updated. There's no place that's more obvious than the dairy/frozen department...

...which still maintains fixtures that are probably a good 25+ years old. There is one row of freezer cases with doors on the inside of the freezer aisle, with coffin cases in the middle and refrigerator cases on the outside. The blue awning feature over the freezers is attractive enough but outdated, and something resembling what would've been put in 90s-era CTowns. It's likely that H Mart and CTown were both using DY Design for store design at the time, although H Mart has since brought design and construction in-house.

I believe I commented on the flooring in Cherry Hill matching 90s CTown flooring. Definitely a similar design.

But, at the very least, these fixtures have been painted if not replaced.

A very cramped nonfoods department takes up the front corner of the store.

Not even sure how customers are expected to navigate this area.

And on the other side of that department is the front-end, with just a few registers.

One more stop before we move on. The main floor of the mall has been redone to include a large food court, which I don't believe H Mart runs but which features mostly Korean and Chinese food. This area is much more recently remodeled than the supermarket, and I've gotta say, my food was quite good here. (This was also my dinner stop.)

And you can see the escalators bringing people to and from the lower level of the mall for the supermarket. Up next, we're headed just about a mile and a quarter northwest on Cheltenham Avenue for our next stop tomorrow, right here on The Market Report!