The Market Report

Shop Fair Supermarkets Opened: October 1, 2026 Owner: unknown Previous Tenants:  Rite Aid Cooperative: Retail Grocers Group / General Trading Location: 2170 Frederick Douglass Blvd, Manhattan, NY Photographed: October 7, 2026 Welcome to Harlem, where a local group of stores has just opened one that's shiny and new! Emphasis on the shiny. More on that soon. Most of the Shop Fair stores I've posted recently are owned by Anibal Rodriguez, whose collection of supermarkets continues expanding. But the group of stores also has a number of other owners, and one of them owns this new Harlem store (I'm not entirely sure exactly who the owner is, though). This is a former Rite Aid, and it's around 15,000 square feet, although I also don't know exactly how large it is. For a long time, I got the sense that the Shop Fair and related Fine Fare stores were kind of just unremarkable, mostly not bad but not that interesting. Lately, though, the group's new openings have be...

ALDI Opened: June 19, 2026 Owner: ALDI Sud Previous Tenants: non-grocery tenants Cooperative: none Location: 311 W 42nd St, Manhattan, NY Photographed: October 7, 2026 The most popular discount supermarket in the US continues its expansion here in New York City, this time with a very high-profile location in midtown Manhattan. It's located right on busy 42nd Street, in a basement just about a block and a half west of Times Square. Though LIDL has expanded across Manhattan (including a brand-new one 16 blocks south ), they haven't yet established an outpost here in famously-expensive Midtown. I used to commute daily into New York on a bus that would stop just outside Port Authority -- basically right outside this store's front door -- but now that I'm not commuting in anymore, I haven't really been back to midtown. So we're seeing this store about four months after its opening. In total, this store is 25,000 square feet, and the whole supermarket is below gr...

LIDL Opened: October 7, 2026 Owner: Schwarz Group Previous Tenants:  Co-op Supermarket (1970s) > The Food Emporium > Morton Williams Associated (open by 1999) > Gristedes (ca. 2000s - 2022) Cooperative: none Location: 335 8th Ave, Manhattan, NY Photographed: October 7, 2026 Fast-growing discounter LIDL now has 16 locations across New York City, so let's check out the latest! (Its primary competitor, ALDI , had 14 but has just opened two more .) This Chelsea store, which opened on Wednesday, comes one week after LIDL opened a location on Staten Island. It's around 12,000 square feet -- LIDL stores have been getting smaller over time, but their New York City locations are understandably on the smaller size, too. I visited on Wednesday, so it was packed with people browsing the new store. I wouldn't expect the levels of crowds you see here to continue once the novelty wears off, but my impression is that generally the LIDL stores here in NYC do pretty well. You ...