The Market Report

Another set of updates, another look at what's going on with Kings. For a quick recap, the chain declared bankruptcy in the summer of 2020, and a winning bid was submitted by Albertsons Companies' ACME Markets in October of 2020. ACME officially took possession of 19 of the 25 stores in January 2021, and since they have been incrementally making small changes to the operation. Now on to the stores... Hillsdale We return to the Hillsdale store for the first time since my original tour from December 2020. All the expected updates have been happening, plus one small surprise we'll see later in the store. Lighting and produce bins have been replaced, which is pretty standard. The produce department has been reset but notably not reduced in size (at other stores, such as Millburn and Livingston, when the produce department has been reset it's been shrunk as well). As I mentioned on the original post, to me it's a no-brainer to remove the produce cases on the right side...

Verona We return to Verona, most recently the site of a bizarre half-remodel right before the ACME acquisition, to see the bread cases that have been going into a lot of the Kings stores is in here too, although we still don't have any signage attached to it as we see in the ACMEs. Morristown Larger and super-deluxe bread display takes up a whole wall in Morristown, although it's the same type as the others that have been going in elsewhere. Morristown has also received three self-checkouts, which I don't recall having posted yet. Mendham Despite many of these signs (of the same type as we saw recently in Millburn ) posted inside and outside of the Mendham Kings, there was no visible work going on. The bread case had been replaced, though... Bedminster And you can guess what the change at Bedminster was too. The bread display looks quite nice here, but I will say that, since this decor is now a solid 10 years old (this was the first Where Inspiration Strikes store back in ...

Kings Food Markets Opened:  unknown, probably 1990s Previous Tenants:  none Location:  450 US-206, Bedminster, NJ Photographed:  November 2020 & July 2021 Our second Bedminster store is the Kings Food Markets at The Hills Village Center, just around the corner from The Fresh Market . This 32,000 square foot store appears to have been opened as a Kings and was not previously a different tenant, and is historically noteworthy for the fact that it was the first store to receive the Where Inspiration Strikes decor package/remodel back in 2012; the second was Livingston . Like Livingston, this store was expanded during its remodel into a neighboring storefront. Worth noting that Livingston's former store manager is now the store manager here. Like almost all the rest of the Kings locations we've seen so far, I photographed this store in November 2020 soon before the ACME deal went through (and ACME officially took over this store and the rest in January 2021). I retur...