The Market Report

A Tale of Two Four! Supermarkets Mount Vernon, NY Part IV: Western Beef No one quite knows what to make of Western Beef. Is it a discount store? No. Is it an ethnic store? No. Is it a specialty store? No. Is it a regular supermarket? No. The Western Beef is closer to the Food Bazaar than either of the other two. The interior is pretty unremarkable, save for Western Beef's trademark walk-in refrigerator room, which is very nice in the summer but was not great in February! Well, that wraps up not only our Mount Vernon supermarket tour, but also our coverage of the Rockland/Westchester area for now! We're headed back to the Northern New Jersey region on Monday for another store tour, so stay tuned!

A Tale of Two Four! Supermarkets Mount Vernon, NY Part I: Foodtown The Mount Vernon, NY Foodtown is a 1960s (I believe) Waldbaums that closed sometime in the 1990s or very early 2000s. It opened soon after as a Foodtown owned by the same owners as the Foodtown of Riverdale in the Bronx. Let's begin with a review of the whole area... The Western Beef is kind of outside of the central area where the others are. ( UPDATE : I realize the C-Town and Foodtown locations are off. They're a few blocks too far to the right. They are labeled correctly below.) Today we're going to look at the Foodtown. The Foodtown has its own small parking lot, which can be quite difficult to navigate if it's full (which it was when I visited on a Saturday evening). The Foodtown was extensively renovated around 2012. Before, the store was pretty depressing, at least from the outside.  The renovation brought some much-needed freshness to the area... All 3-D map and stre...

Starting on Friday... A TALE OF TWO SUPERMARKETS Mount Vernon, NY Friday 9/22: TOUR - Foodtown The newly renovated medium-sized supermarket! Wednesday 9/27: TOUR - Food Bazaar The new, huge invader! BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Order right now and we'll give you DOUBLE the stores! Bonus Stores: Monday 9/25: SNAPSHOT - CTown The neighborhood standby! Friday 9/29: SNAPSHOT - Western Beef Can anyone explain Western Beef? OVERVIEW A Note About Posting If you haven't noticed from the dates above, I'm moving away from the usual Wednesday/Saturday posting pattern. There's one reason for this -- I have such a crazy amount of material to post that according to my original plan, I already had enough to cover into next June, with two posts a week! So for that reason, I'm switching to three posts a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday . We'll be starting on Friday with the Foodtown tour. Scroll down to see today's SNAPSHOT: the 5th Ave...

A Tale of Two Supermarkets: Flanders Part II ShopRite, Flanders, NJ On Wednesday we saw the Weis Market of Flanders. Today we're heading across the street to the former Weis, which opened in 1999 and closed in 2002, with ShopRite taking over later that year. The ShopRite is owned and operated by the Romano family under their business, RoNetco Supermarkets . We saw their Byram store last September. While Flanders does have some RoNetco touches, it's still a Weis in many ways. Or I should say, it's distinctly NOT a ShopRite. Every ShopRite has a certain feeling you get when you walk in, which you don't get in Flanders. That's not to say it's not a nice store. It is, but it's a little on the plain side. The outside is really nice, though.   You enter through the glass tower. Then you make a sharp left turn to go past customer service and pharmacy on your left. Bakery is in the front left (from the photo above) corner, with deli/prepared foods in an...