The Market Report

DECEMBER For today's Post of the Month, we're heading back to Elizabeth, NJ for an appropriately quick look at the Quick Food & Deli store at 283 Westfield Ave. Hard to describe exactly what this store is, having never been here. The outside claims they have groceries, meat, deli, dairy, and paper goods. Pretty full-service for a bodega! Google street view, 2016.

Fairway is a strange chain. I visited their location in Woodland Park, NJ when it first opened and was not impressed. I found the selection mediocre and prices outrageous, and the prepared foods were only decent. On the other hand, I've visited two in Manhattan, both of which I liked a lot more. One, in Harlem, I visited summer 2016, and you can see my pictures here . This location, in Chelsea, most directly competes with the Ideal Marketplace we saw on Monday. This Fairway is a pretty cool store, but by far its coolest feature is the cart return. Obviously, being on a busy city street in Manhattan, they can't exactly store carts on the sidewalk outside. So what do you do? Ingenious! Because you can get at the carts from the side, you can pull them out effectively, but you can also store a good long line of them under this produce case. Kudos to the designers of this feature!

We've discussed NSA Supermarkets and America's Food Basket before, so here's one of AFB's two stores in Manhattan, NY, in the fairly upscale neighborhood of Chelsea. This Ideal Marketplace was previously branded an NSA Supermarket, and it's a very modern store. Here's a tip: if you're going to open a supermarket, don't put a dark green sign on a black background. What's the name of this store? Oh, you can't tell? Let's go a little closer... Better? Not really. Now I guess most people who shop in this store already know about it and walk or take public transportation, so they don't need to catch the eye of a tourist passing by. But come on, can't you just put the word Ideal  in white? I spotted this sign with the NSA logo still on it in the dairy section. Can anyone understand it and give me a translation? From this single mediocre photo, we can see the interior is very upscale and modern. It's a beautiful store ...

SuperFresh Opened:  2016 Owner:  Shee Chun Lee Previous Tenants:  Pathmark (1992-2015) Cooperative:  Key Food Stores Location:  471-79 Lyons Ave, Irvington, NJ Photographed:  March 12, 2025 and January 21, 2026 Before we begin, just a heads up: this was originally posted in December 2017, but was rewritten with new photos in January 2026. Now for the post! Today, The Market Report visits Irvington, a city right outside Newark (and in fact, this store is about three blocks from the Newark border). Pathmark built this store in 1992. It's very close to a former ShopRite-turned-Pathmark just over the border in Newark, but that store actuallly closed by 1986. So there was a gap of about six years between that store's closure and this store's opening. This one became the first Pathmark Sav-A-Center in 2008, closing with the rest of the chain in 2015. Shortly thereafter, a Key Food operator moved in and renovated the store before reopening in the spring of ...

  DECEMBER Welcome to a new feature here at NJ Supermarkets! Each Saturday, I'll have a Something of the Month post. This is just a quick look at something I found interesting, and isn't content I've created. It also means there's something new every day except Sunday... Monday: Store tour here Tuesday: Facebook post Wednesday: Snapshot here Thursday: Preview of next week's store tour on Facebook Friday: Snapshot here Saturday: Post of the Month here And I have a new feature for Sunday coming soon! This week, we're taking a look at a former supermarket, a Supermarkets General-owned ShopRite-turned-Pathmark at 6 South Ave E in Cranford, NJ. At some point in the 1980s (?) the Pathmark moved down the street to 10 South Ave, Garwood, NJ, which later became The Food Emporium and Superfresh. This older location became a Drug Fair which in turn was bought by Dollar General when Drug Fair went under. Google street view, 2016.

I don't know why people hate CTown so much. I think most of it is CTown's historical reputation, but I've found every CTown I've visited to be really good. Clean, well-stocked, bright, and good prices. This one was no exception... Alphabet City is a neighborhood of Manhattan, just southeast of Stuyvesant Town . Historically Alphabet City was one of the worst neighborhoods of the City, but as always, gentrification is spreading through. Clearly gentrification has its benefits and disadvantages, but I was actually very happy to find this CTown a holdover from pre-gentrification Alphabet City. That means very Latin selections, Spanish-speaking employees, great produce, and low prices. There's something about a CTown that makes you feel welcome as soon as you walk in. I don't know what it is, and I doubt it's a conscious effort among all of the CTown owners, but I just immediately feel comfortable in a CTown, the way Associated Supermarkets feel somewh...

In New York City, there are two chains that buy wholesale from Wakefern (ShopRite): Morton Williams and Gristedes. (D'Agostino, which shares an owner with Gristedes, is an Allegiance member and gets the Foodtown storebrand.) Morton Williams is an independent, wannabe-gourmet chain that ends up being just expensive. Morton Williams was previously an Associated Food Stores (now Associated Supermarket Group) operator that split around 2010, renaming all of their Associated Supermarkets Morton Williams Supermarkets . This store, in the ritzy Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan, NYC, feels like an Associated frozen in time since the 1980s, complete with neon signage inside and out, but with the prices of a Kings from here in the suburbs. To tell the truth, I can't believe Morton Williams still manages to hang on.

Almost a year ago, in January 2017 , I noticed that when Key Food launched its Superfresh website, it listed one unidentifiable store. The only possibility for that location, I wrote, was " if SF plans to open a new store in the former  A Seabra Foods  in Roselle, which is  approximately  where that icon is." Guess what? When I visited a relative's house in Elizabeth on Saturday night around 4PM, I noticed a Superfresh circular. I thought maybe Irvington, but no! Less than an hour later, I was at the store. It's still in progress, hence the dumpster in the parking lot. It was filled with lots of garbage and some renovation debris, like these old ceiling tiles! Before we head in, here's some history on the store. It was built in the 1950s as a Food Fair with the style of that time: small parking lot in front, large parking lot in the rear. What makes this a particularly interesting example is that the stores are actually arranged in a circle ar...