The Market Report

Ashley Marketplace Owner: Cheol Kim Opened:  2013 Cooperative:  none Location:  1 South Orange Ave, South Orange, NJ Photographed:  June 2022 We return to Ashley Marketplace after first seeing it back in the summer of 2018. Unfortunately, the past four years have not been kind to the gourmet supermarket and cafe, with a visit last week showing the store clearly struggling. By the way, the store closed for a few weeks in 2019 "for renovation," but reopened shortly thereafter with no apparent changes. At some point between the summer of 2020 and the summer of 2022, the store did in fact make some major changes to its layout and selection. We're going to take a trip through the somewhat mazelike store from the back entrance, facing the parking garage. The produce department is actually looking really good with the newly streamlined setup, until we start noticing the shelves and shelves of bottled water in what used to be a produce cooler on the right. Also, oddly eno...

On last week's Ashley Marketplace post , I mentioned that the location was previously part of the Eden Gourmet chain. One of the few remaining locations of Eden Gourmet is this store at 7 E 14th St, Manhattan, NY. I visited this store, operating under the Garden of Eden banner, and was thoroughly unimpressed with its selection, prices, and service. However, the store is very attractive and is a better alternative to the nearby Gristedes .

By now we've talked a lot about Village Super Market , a ShopRite operator. The name comes from their original location which was in South Orange, or the Township of South Orange Village, officially. You can see a drawing of the original location from their Facebook page here . The store opened in 1937 and by the mid- to late-1950s had joined the Wakefern cooperative. Village's second location opened around the same time in East Orange, with later locations in Orange, West Orange, and Maplewood , which borders South Orange. The South Orange location closed in 1996, and remained vacant for many years until New York City-based Eden Gourmet Marketplace opened in 2007: Eden Gourmet Marketplace, 1 South Orange Ave, South Orange, NJ. Google Maps street view from 2012. The struggling Eden chain of stores recently has closed most of their stores in Manhattan and sold this location and their store in Hoboken around 2014 to an independent operator. The Hoboken store became Aspen...