The Market Report

Florham Park What's our usual collection of updates without at least one ACME and at least one Kings? I returned to the Kings in Florham Park, which we toured not too long ago, to coincidentally capture the beautiful sunset over the store. That stunning picture was a pleasant surprise, but not what I came to the store for. What is, in fact, very noticeable is that inside the lighting has been replaced. Not quite as beautiful as the sunset, but still brightens up the store a great deal. If you check back to the original post (pre-ACME), you can see the squares used to have those older fixtures with the reflective grate over the light itself. These newer ones have also appeared in multiple other stores including the Kenilworth ACME . Not sure if you can see them in my pictures, but I've noticed them in-store. If you look back at any of my pre-acquisition Kings store tours, you can really clearly see just how dingy a lot of the stores were. They're looking much better now. ...

There's been a bit of work going on at the Kings locations since ACME took over the chain in January 2021. Not much happened between then and roughly this July, when stuff finally started changing (though admittedly not all that much, which has been quite disappointing to me). I've gotten to quite a few of the locations to investigate the changes. Here's an (overly?) exhaustive rundown of changes to stores we've already seen... Montclair (pictured above) As of July 12, the aisle markers had been replaced -- setting the change at some point between December 2020 and July 2021. I'm unsure whether that was done right before or right after the ACME acquisition. Also as of July 12, the price tags had been switched over to the ACME/Albertsons type, and five self-checkouts had been installed. See my tour of Montclair here . Verona Verona's POS system update/self-checkout installation was completed on July 15, 2021. Five self-checkouts were installed and I assume the pr...