The Market Report

ALDI Food Market Opened: October 31, 2024 Owner:  ALDI Sud Previous Tenants:  ShopRite (ca. 1990-2021) Cooperative:  none Location:  625 Hamburg Tpk, Wayne, NJ Photographed: November 8, 2024 If there's one thing I like about my part of the world, it's that the supermarket scene never seems to get boring. Stores are opening and closing left and right, moving, renovating, rebranding. This weekend's 11 stores (all of which had something happen within the last few weeks or months) illustrate exactly that. The only other place I've seen that has anything like it is the Chicago area, where I traveled a while ago -- and don't worry, I've brought back the best souvenir ever: pictures of supermarkets. While we're not in Illinois now, we are seeing an Illinois-based chain in today's special report! (Yeah, I know. That's a lame transition. What do you want from me? I'm writing 11 posts at once.) Here in Wayne, New Jersey, a ShopRite built around the late 8...

Anatolia Market Opened:  ca. April 2024 Owner:  unknown Previous Tenants:  assorted non-grocery tenants > Green Life Market (Apr 2022-Oct 2023) Cooperative:  none Location:  29 NJ-23, Wayne, NJ Photographed:  May 10, 2024 So apparently a former buffet near Willowbrook Mall is not a hospitable location for a natural foods store. Green Life Market opened in April of 2023, then closed in October of the same year. It was a very pleasant store if hard to get to and a bit hard to navigate even once you're inside given the building's history. Last month, a Turkish grocery store called Anatolia Market moved into the space, essentially keeping it as it was while changing the product mix for a wide variety of Middle Eastern groceries and halal meat. My pictures are a little more limited this time around because the layout and fixtures haven't really been changed since it was Green Life, and it was essentially brand-new so there wasn't much to update. Unfortunatel...

Green Life Market Owner: Mervet Yassin Opened:  2022 Cooperative:  INFRA Location:  29 NJ-23, Wayne, NJ Photographed:  January 5, 2023 It's time to check out this brand-new, 13,000 square foot natural supermarket in Wayne, NJ, right next to the Willowbrook Mall! This supermarket really isn't like any other grocery store out there because of what it was previously. We've seen stores that were built as drugstores, warehouses, factories, theaters -- but this one was a buffet restaurant. It had a few tenants before closing during the coronavirus. In 2022, local natural food store chain Green Life Market began renovating the space and it opened in the late summer or early fall. We will see clues of this building's past, including a lot of the flooring and ceiling. But it's been turned into a very nice and very complete natural food supermarket. We enter to a dairy case across what I assume used to be the host stand at the entrance of the restaurant (can't say I'...

ShopRite of Wayne Hills Owner: Inserra Supermarkets Opened:  October 31, 2021 Previous Tenants:  on site of former Wayne Hills Mall Cooperative:  Wakefern Food Corp. Location:  30 Wayne Hills Mall, Wayne, NJ Photographed:  December 2021 We arrive at the Wayne Hills Mall in Wayne, NJ to check out the brand-new Wayne Hills ShopRite! As much as I am sad to see the ancient -- and totally unique -- Wayne ShopRite just west on Hamburg Turnpike close up shop, its replacement about a mile and a quarter northwest is beautiful. The 80,000 square foot store is located on what used to be the indoor mall portion of the Wayne Hills Mall, which was demolished. The mall also includes a Burlington Coat Factory to the left of the ShopRite, a vacant Toys R Us and Kmart across the parking lot, and an LA Fitness in a former Pathmark. The ShopRite opened on Halloween 2021. So that means that the ShopRite is bringing some much-needed life to this mall. It does also mean that Plaza ...