ShopRite
Opened: April 9, 2025
Opened: April 9, 2025
Owner: Village Super Market
We're back at the Watchung ShopRite to check out what the heck is going on. To recap: Village Super Market owns about 30 ShopRite stores, and about 10 more under the Fairway and Gourmet Garage brands in NYC. They brought the Fairway and Gourmet Garage brands into some of their other locations, with Fairway-branded coffee, cheese, and bakery departments, and Gourmet Garage-branded prepared foods. Then, at the end of May, Village very abruptly removed all of those branded items and departments. The Gourmet Garage-branded prepared foods are now packaged with labels devoid of any branding at all, and the Fairway and Gourmet Garage brands have been meticulously removed from all Village ShopRite stores. In Watchung, and possibly Old Bridge, signs reading "Village ShopRite" have also been removed. In some cases, the Fairway logos were removed from signs by covering them with duct tape or by literally cutting them out of paper signs with scissors. You can read my past coverage here and here.
We're back at Watchung to see that Village has doubled down on these confusing de-branding efforts. In the previously Fairway-branded coffee department, the duct tape and scissors strike again. At first, Village covered the Fairway brand on each sign with a small piece of tape (is it perhaps electrical tape and not duct tape?) and rotated the barrels so the Fairway name wasn't as visible. See here. At some point between the end of May and this week, Village returned to the coffee department. They cut off some of the signs to remove the Fairway name, and went back to duct tape over each barrel's Fairway logo -- even the ones in the back that you would've really had to strain to see. The slogan, Like No Other Market, is still partially visible on one barrel...
And over in seafood, a sign that oddly had been reduced to simply "Garage" is now completely covered with tape:
Previous Tenants: assorted non-grocery tenants
Cooperative: Wakefern Food Corp.
Location: 1701 US-22, Watchung, NJ
Photographed: July 23, 2025
Well, I am as confused as ever. It's been a couple months now, and nothing has changed other than more duct tape. Two months after the initial round of duct tape went up, I'd expect to see a real fix going in rather than more of the same. They couldn't even get small ShopRite or Village Super Market stickers made at Staples or something to cover these by now, instead of literal tape? I'm sure the average customer hasn't noticed anything, but I can't come up with any good explanation as to why, months later, the duct tape remains. As an aside, I did visit a Fairway in NYC recently, and it was completely normal. All branding was exactly as it always had been, and there was no apparent effort to change anything at all. Presumably, someone decided that the Fairway and Gourmet Garage names couldn't be used on stores that weren't called Fairway or Gourmet Garage, but months later, it's just as odd as day 1. I'll keep an eye on it and report back if anything else changes! In the meantime...
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