The Market Report

Food Bazaar Supermarket Owner: Spencer An Opened:  August 8, 2024 Previous Tenants:  Stop & Shop (2006-February 2024) Location:  2145 Fairfield Ave, Bridgeport, CT Photographed:  August 18, 2024 Today's four posts so far have focused on Stop & Shop stores that are closing and will become Food Bazaar locations in the future, in Piscataway , Carlstadt , Brooklyn , and Mount Vernon . Now let's visit a store at a different point in that process. The Fairfield Avenue Stop & Shop on the West Side of Bridgeport, CT, closed in February 2024 after Food Bazaar's owners bought the building the previous fall. Stop & Shop's lease ended in February and they closed at that point, citing underperformance . Food Bazaar renovated the space from February until early August, and the store held its soft opening on August 8, later holding an official ribbon cutting and grand opening on August 29. (I will note here: although this is not one of the stores in the group of 3...

Price Rite Marketplace Opened: by 2008 Previous Tenants:  A&P (open by 1954, closed after 1985) Location:  164 Boston Ave, Bridgeport, CT Photographed:  July 9, 2023 Today's Bridgeport stop is a roughly 44,000 square foot Price Rite, one of two here in Bridgeport. The other is north of here next to Bridgeport's sole remaining Stop & Shop . ( One recently closed to make way for Food Bazaar, another closed back in 2012 and remains vacant .) This store was built with the rest of the strip mall in the early 1950s as an A&P, which remained until at least 1985 and was a WEO (Warehouse Economy Outlet, owned by A&P) for some of that time. I'm not sure what happened between 1985 and whenever Price Rite opened, which was before 2008, although it's likely there was at least one other tenant in there. That's all for Bridgeport this time around, but now we're going to head around 16 miles north to start a loop of mostly independent stores in and around Lit...

Stop & Shop Opened: 2006 Previous Tenants:  none Location:  2145 Fairfield Ave, Bridgeport, CT Photographed:  December 11, 2023 Stop & Shop is from Massachusetts, but they've established themselves with a pretty significant presence in a few other states -- Connecticut and Rhode Island most notably, where they are the market leader. They have a significant presence in New York (especially Long Island) and New Jersey, too, though their forays into New Hampshire and Vermont were decidedly unsuccessful. While they're quite strong in Connecticut, there are a few places that they falter, and they really are not good at running stores in big cities. They've closed several New York City stores in the last few years, and most recently, announced they were closing one of their two Bridgeport stores. This one was built in 2006 and is expected to close by February 2024 -- the other one in Bridgeport is older and was renovated and expanded in the 90s, but hasn't been redo...