The Market Report

Apna Bazar Farmers Market Owner: Himanshu Bajaj Opened:  2022 Cooperative:  none Location:  85 Gateway Dr, Mechanicsburg, PA Photographed:  August 14, 2022 Today's post is a quick look at the Apna Bazar Farmers Market in Mechanicsburg, PA, taking the roughly 19,000 square foot space previously occupied by Grocery Outlet . Just last year, the Indian supermarket opened in the closed Grocery Outlet, which moved a bit south in 2022. It appears to be related to the Apna Bazar we saw in Edison , but as I mentioned on that post, it's very hard to tell for sure. It doesn't look like Apna Bazar is reusing much if anything from Grocery Outlet. While there are plenty more supermarkets in Mechanicsburg, that's all we'll be seeing this time around, and tomorrow we're headed just north to Enola for a look at a relatively new store over on The Market Report !

Grocery Outlet Owner: Dane & Natalie Sanford Opened:  2018 Previous Tenants:  assorted non-grocery tenants Location:  2541 Nazareth Rd, Easton, PA Photographed:  January 8, 2021 It's time for another Grocery Outlet! We saw one back in Philadelphia , and this promising hard-discount format is quickly growing in the Philadelphia/New Jersey area. The most recent opening in the area was in Hazlet, NJ, just next to the former ALDI we saw when we were down there. (I suppose I shouldn't say the format is promising as it's already been proven successful in this area and elsewhere, instead, it seems to be a successful addition to this area's competitive grocery market.) I visited my first Grocery Outlet ever back in 2015 in Allentown and was rather impressed. Unlike other discount stores that rely primarily on private label products, Grocery Outlet has a mix of storebrand and name brand items, and this 25,000 square foot store is a pleasant example of one of their newer ...

Grocery Outlet Owner: Aaron & Chyrese Hollingsworth Opened:  2021 Previous Tenants:  none Location:  25 W Hortter St, Mount Airy, Philadelphia, PA Photographed:  July 30, 2021 It's time to check out The Market Report's first Grocery Outlet! I remember first visiting a Grocery Outlet in western Allentown, Pennsylvania many years ago and I was honestly quite impressed. It was a totally different experience from the other hard-discount stores I'd seen. The store was clean, nicely organized, and modern looking, but most interesting: almost all the products on the shelves were name-brand products, with some storebrands mixed in throughout. Many discounters like Save-A-Lot and ALDI rely heavily on private label brands. Not only that, the perishables were much better than a comparable Save-A-lot. I'm very happy to see more very nice-looking Grocery Outlets popping up out here on the East Coast, given that it was a West Coast-originating chain. Today, there are four in ...

 Price Rite vs. Aldi  I'm not generally a big fan of the no-frills discount stores, but I do think two (in this area) have really set themselves up for success by being a little better and/or different. In my opinion, those are Price Rite and Aldi. Price Rite is the discount end of Wakefern Food Corporation, the corporation that runs the ShopRite cooperative. According to their website, they offer "impossibly, incredibly, inconceivably low prices everyday," but I think their real strength comes from not just focusing on the cheap, sodium and fat-filled canned goods, frozen foods, and packaged goods most discount stores sell. Sure, Price Rite sells these - as does just about every other supermarket - but because of their comparatively larger store sizes, they also have the space to offer more fresh options. This image is from an article about the grand opening of a Price Rite from universalhub.com. As the article says, Price Rite has no service departments, but ...