The Market Report

Food Lion Opened: 1990s Previous Tenants:  none Location:  22485 Lankford Hwy, Cape Charles, VA Photographed:  December 2019 You know the deal by now. 35,000 square foot, 90s-era Food Lion on route 13. Unfortunately, that's the majority of the grocery stores that we're stuck with in this area. This has the distinction of being the southernmost supermarket on the Delmarva Peninsula. I do want to apologize for the boring supermarkets for a lot of the Delmarva group, which we are concluding today, and in Hampton Roads/Norfolk which we start tomorrow. I was in the area in December 2019/January 2020 for a family reunion, which is not overly conducive to supermarket visits, so we're limited by the places we drove by and stopped at to pick up the necessary groceries for us. Consequently, the next couple of weeks are going to be similarly boring. (I actually spent almost half an hour back in January 2020, in Norfolk, frantically going through my pictures and trying to genuinely ...

Original Tenant: unknown Address: 2625 Lankford Hwy, Exmore, VA Opened:  unknown Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  Fresh Pride (closed May 2014) Photographed:  December 2019 A very interesting bit of Delmarva/Hampton Roads supermarket history here. At one time, the company that owned Fresh Pride Supermarkets owned over 50 supermarkets; by 2013, they were down to just 10, all of which closed abruptly in sequence over the course of a few months. There's not a clear explanation that I was able to find for those closures -- as opposed to the whole chain going out of business all at once, for instance, or selling some individual stores and then closing the rest. I'm not sure what the 28,000 square foot square foot store was built as, or when it was built. But the Fresh Pride signage remained here at least five years after the store's closure, as we see here in 2019. Some inadvertently nice sky in these shots, which were taken on a winter late afternoon on the way to Nor...

Food Lion Opened: unknown Previous Tenants:  none Location:  25102 Lankford Hwy, Onley, VA Photographed:  December 2019 Another drive-by Food Lion. I can't find an opening date for this store, but it is 35,000 square feet making it approximately the same size as every other Food Lion in this area. If you'd like to tour a more interesting store, check out Matthews Market about 13 miles north. We do have one final Food Lion on the Delmarva peninsula, but first, check out a different former supermarket about 12 miles south on Grocery Archaeology tomorrow!

Food Lion Opened: 2002 Previous Tenants:  none Location:  7013 Lankford Hwy, Oak Hall, VA Photographed:  December 2019 Another quick look at a Food Lion, this one just over the border into Virginia! This roughly 34,000 square foot store was built in 2002 with the rest of the strip mall, so it's on the newer side, but as we've been seeing with the Food Lions, it's on the smaller side. Tomorrow, we're heading south of here for a look at an independent store on The Independent Edition , and then it's back to Food Lion!

Food Lion Opened: ca. 1990s Previous Tenants:  none Location:  10138 Old Ocean City Blvd, Berlin, MD Photographed:  December 2019 Again, apologies for the bad car-window photos. This Food Lion was built between 1989 and 2005, and I'd bet that it was on the earlier end of that but I very well could be wrong. The 35,000 square foot store is the older of the two Food Lions in town, but it's actually the larger -- the other is just shy of 32,000. Food Lion does tend to have some of the smaller stores in the realm of big-chain supermarkets, many of which are closer to the 30-40,000 square foot range than the 60-70,000 range. Any mid-Atlantic locals, do you have any explanations for this phenomenon? I promise that tomorrow we have better pictures as we take a look inside an independent supermarket just south of here on The Independent Edition !

Food Lion Opened: ca. 1980s Previous Tenants:  none Location:  32 N Dupont Hwy, Selbyville, DE Photographed:  December 2019 We're just about 2800 feet away from the Maryland border here in Selbyville at the Mason Dixon Food Lion, a roughly 31,000 square foot rather unremarkable Food Lion. Selbyville has a second Food Lion, too, about seven miles east. That store, which looks nicer, opened around 2009. This wraps up our very fast look at Delaware, and up next, we jump into Maryland! Come back here to check it out.

Save-A-Lot Owner:  unknown Opened: unknown Previous Tenants:  unknown Location:  28632 Dupont Blvd, Millsboro, DE Photographed:  January 2020 Quick look today at the Save-A-Lot in Millsboro. I can't quite pin down an opening date for this roughly 25,000 square foot store, but it would've been between 2008 and 2010. Previously, it was an Ace Hardware but I wouldn't be surprised if it had been built as a supermarket way back. The facade looks deceptively like a Pathmark facade, but for one, I don't believe Pathmark ever came this far south, and for another, the red stripe to the right of the Save-A-Lot logo (which looks like Pathmark) was only added when Save-A-Lot moved in. Anyway, we've got one more Delaware store, and it's our first of several Food Lions. So come back tomorrow to check it out!

Original Tenant: Safeway Address: 20769 Dupont Blvd, Georgetown, DE Opened:  unknown Closed:  1987 Later Tenants:  unknown Photographed:  January 2020 This is a very interesting building here in Georgetown. It's about 20,000 square feet, built around an 11,000 square foot Marina Safeway. Gotta love that arched roof! So this was built by Safeway but closed in 1987 after a dispute with the union. Safeway wanted to cut benefits and a few other things for their union employees, which the workers voted to reject; at which point Safeway decided to close six stores that would become unprofitable. This was one of the six. Shortly after that announcement was made in early 1987, Safeway walked back the decision, announcing that three of the six were not to close (and Georgetown was decided to stay open). After some further negotiations between Safeway, the union, and various local governments and organizations, Safeway agreed to not close any but to sell them all. Some went ...

Redner's Warehouse Markets Opened: 2012 Previous Tenants:  none Location:  28253 Lexus Dr, Milford, DE Photographed:  December 2019 Apologies for the terribleness of these pictures. Again, most of these pictures in the Delmarva Peninsula were shot out a car window while on a road trip with family. I managed to get one shot that looks decent at the top here, but you can see what I was working with below. This Redner's is quite interesting because the 50,000 square foot store was built brand-new in 2012 by Redner's despite its similarity in appearance to the 1990s GIANT-PA store design. Allow me to recommend reading over the comments here for more detail on what's going on, and to see a much better picture of the storefront. Really not a whole lot to see on the inside. Tomorrow, we do have a very interesting former supermarket over on Grocery Archaeology a little farther to the south of here!

Save-A-Lot Owner:  unknown Opened:  ??-2021 Previous Tenants:  unknown Location:  696 N Dupont Blvd, Milford, DE Photographed:  December 2019 It's our first Delaware store tour! And, uh, unfortunately, it's our last. See, I was passing through the Delmarva peninsula on a family road trip from New Jersey to Norfolk -- so I was not exactly the one calling the shots. Consequently, my coverage of the area is sadly rather limited. There's still some good stuff here, though. We can't exactly see this here, but the roughly 14,000 square foot Save-A-Lot appears to be in part or all of a 1950s/60s-era ACME. In fact, it looks like the ACME would've taken up the whole strip of Save-A-Lot and everything to the left. So it's not overly exciting but I am glad I photographed this Save-A-Lot, albeit a very rushed photography mission, because it closed in December 2020 or January 2021. Looks like it was a casualty of Save-A-Lot's switch from retailer to wholesaler. Glad to h...

 Welcome back, everyone, to our regularly-scheduled programming of supermarket coverage! We are progressing south along the eastern seaboard of the United States, as promised, through first the Delmarva Peninsula, the first stop south of New Jersey. The peninsula extends south from the Wilmington/Newark, DE and Elkton, MD areas down through Cape Charles, VA. The entirety of the tiny state of Delaware is on the peninsula, along with the eastern part of Maryland, and the southern part of the peninsula is Virginia. The cities paralleling the peninsula on the mainland include, from north to south, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Richmond, and Norfolk is just to the south of the southern tip of the peninsula. So we're going to take a look at a few stores primarily along the US-13/113 corridor as we wander down to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, which connects Cape Charles to Norfolk. Head over to The Independent Edition for our first Delaware stop, which is interesting, to say the least!