A&P closing more stores!
The news is over a week old at this point but in case you missed it, like I did, A&P has announced more closings. 14 to be exact. You can read a short article at Supermarket News which includes a list of all affected stores.
An article over on NorthJersey.com includes a bit more information about the current state of the company. Namely the speculation of analysts that the company will eventually close 100 underperforming stores in order to get things back on track. While all of this is pretty bad news, it is important to keep in mind that a good amount of the store closings, past and present, are due to the overlapping of A&P and Pathmark locations. The article on NorthJersey.com discuses the A&P in Garfield New Jersey but doesn't mention that a Pathmark, just blocks away, will remain open.
This is good news for the Acme in the Davisville Shopping Center in Warminster, PA, as it is only a couple miles away from the Pathmark that is closing in Upper Moreland.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
DeletePurely negative comments left by "Anonymous" are not welcome on the blog.
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DeleteAs for the six Waldbaums that are closing, five of them are in Suffolk...
ReplyDelete- East Islip: small outdated store that's dwarfed by a pretty big and recently remodeled Stop & Shop on Sunrise Highway. There's two more Pathmarks west of there (Bay Shore and Islip), and one Waldbaums not too far east (Oakdale).
- Lake Ronkonkoma: A Fresh Market that again is right near a huge, monstrous Stop & Shop. Still surprising considering the lack of other competition around the Lake Ronkonkoma area, plus they left a really disgusting A&P relic 5 minutes away in Holbrook.
- West Babylon: There's 2 Stop & Shops, a Shoprite, a Pathmark (and another Pathmark in North Babylon), a King Kullen...I don't live near there, but something tells me there's only so much business that can go around.
- Huntington Station: They have a store on Route 110 in Melville not close by, plus they're competing with themselves with a Pathmark nearby. There's also yet another monstrous S&S to pose a threat.
- Commack: Hey, one store that wasn't killed by Stop & Shop. This one is the doing of Wal-Mart, Target, and a recently-opened ShopRite.
I heard about this about a week ago, and the only store on the list familiar to me is the Pathmark in Egg Harbor Township NJ. What happens to it will be really interesting because a Genuardi's is also nearby, and the future of the four Genuardi's in NJ is uncertain right now. I predict they will close if ShopRite doesn't buy them. There also was a Super Fresh right nearby which closed several years back and is a Produce Junction now. Not to mention the 50's Pleasantville Acme was close by too (the one next to the Woolco/Kmart). I don't get why Genuardi's ever entered NJ in the first place. All four neighborhoods in the state where they operate are rural. They traditionally have been a very urban chain, however they always avoided Philly itself. But actually Norristown PA, where they started, is kind of rural.
ReplyDeleteI would not describe Norristown as rural. It is in fact one of the most urbanized areas in Montgomery county.
ReplyDeleteThe Garfield A&P (which oddly enough was a Pathmark until around 1993, when they were shut down by the Garfield Health Department) has been in trouble for several years now. They don't draw crowds like they used to- you go back to 1994, when the store first opened up as an A&P, it was jumping. There was no real competition for food stores in that area- there was the old Garfield Foodtown, the Saddle Brook Foodtown, and the Elmwood Park and Lexington Ave-Clifton Grand Unions nearest there (I don't know if the 8th Street ShopRite in Passaic was open yet, but I don't think it was) and all of those stores were struggling for business. You fast forward ahead to the beginning of last decade and now you added the Botany Plaza Pathmark on the Clifton side of the Passaic River and the Elmwood Park Pathmark near the Grand Union, and that just dilutes everything further.
ReplyDeleteA&P really hasn't had much use for the Garfield store ever since they acquired Pathmark- the Botany Plaza Pathmark more than pulls its weight saleswise and has since the store opened in spring 1997. I was surprised it took them so long to decide what they were going to do with those two stores- I figured, since the Pathmark was newer and busier and the A&P building, despite being rehabilitated prior to its opening, was going to be on the chopping block once they figured out what they were going to do with all those stores.
Just by way of clarification, these articles you link to are on NorthJersey.com, not NJ.com. NorthJersey.com is associated with The Bergen Record while NJ.com is associated with The Star-Ledger of Newark. Two different entities entirely.
ReplyDeleteFixed! Thanks for pointing that out.
ReplyDeleteAcme will be the next one on chopping block.I give them no more then two years,then this site will be called the death of acme.
ReplyDeleteThe name of this site will not be changing but thanks for your concern.
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ReplyDeleteI don't mean to be a smart aleck but why are all these comments being censored? As someone who fled a Third World country as a child many years ago, I cherish the free speech normally offered by the Internet. I respect your rules but it just scares me to see comments edited, deleted, moderated, etc every site I go to these days. Why does "this comment has been removed" show up anyway?
ReplyDeleteWe have an "Anonymous" individual leaving completely pointless comments, often with the intent to insult employees of Acme. I do not permit such comments on the blog. The removal notices have been left so the person is made aware that their comments are purposely being deleted. Normally comments that I don't approve of are deleted without notice. I have and will continue to remove comments that offer absolutely no value to the mission of the blog, most especially by those leaving such comments as "Anonymous".
ReplyDeleteThere's a difference between censorship and combating trolling, and if someone is going to make idiotic comments than the owner of the page is well within his/her rights to do something about it. Those who call it censorship, quite frankly, don't have a true grasp of what censorship really is.
ReplyDeleteA troll was exactly what we were dealing with.
ReplyDeleteI know that some of these closings are necessary due to the overlap when A&P bought Pathmark... however A&P didn't compete as much with Pathmark over the years so they didn't have too many head to head stores; one store that did go head to head in north Jersey was West Paterson (now Woodland Park) A&P. Before they bought Pathmark, they built a store behind its old location on Rte. 46... it really didn't hurt Pathmark, much less Shop Rite across the street for years and I wondered how they kept it open. Then, the Pathmark shuts down, which did almost double the volume of the A&P... A&P said they favored their own leases over some of the other Pathmark locations leases.
ReplyDeleteIf they thought they were driving people to the A&P by closing the Pathmark, I think it backfired because all it did was drive people to the ShopRite and leaves the door open for Stop&Shop to open a location in the old Pathmark, although Stop&Shop has a new location up the road in Clifton about 4 miles away.
A different example would be the East Brunswick stores; there was a Pathmark on Rte. 18 many years and A&P built a nice size store just behind it off Rte 18... A&P was not really hurting the Pathmark but they didn't use the same thinking as they did in West Paterson, they closed the A&P and now it has reopened as a Stop & Shop...
The only A&P that did more volume than a Pathmark was Mahwah, which beat the Pathmark in Ramsey and oddly enough, the PM in Ramsey is still open and not listed on the list of stores closing.
Fact remains that A&P is closing almost 1/3 of their store base and there are many locations that really should not be shut, they just need to come up with a better price/merchandising plan for Pathmark because they're just allowing ShopRite and Stop&Shop to 'eat their lunch'...
It's just sad to see an Iconic retailer as A&P raise the white flag in areas where they should be able to compete better than Stop & Shop in the metro New York/New Jersey market.
The West Patterson situation is fascinating to me. I have no idea how that ShopRite draws so much business. I guess a low price is all anybody wants these days. I've been in there all of two times, each time swearing I would never go back. The parking lot is a nightmare. The store is a hodge podge of different buildings and an addition. One of the most poorly laid out grocery stores I've ever been. They didn't even carry the item I went in for, which is another problem I find at ShopRites in general. I'll take the A&P across the street anytime!
ReplyDeleteAcmeStyle...The ShopRite, if I'm not mistaken, was just one building and the store was all that was there (if you noticed, they have two Shop-Rite signs up- one with the original Shop-Rite logo and the other with the newest most recent logo on it). My guess is that addition was added so they could expand the store and once they figured that they didn't need the extra space it was subdivided- you had the bank, the liquor store, a pizza place, and a Wonder Store in there. The first bit of construction after the addition, I think, was the glass atrium front they have in front of the registers. Then they took over the Wonder Store for the produce and bakery sections. They then took the pizza place, turned that into the photo section and more space for produce and the bakery, and blocked off the main entrance which put you by where the pharmacy is. But you're right- that layout is horrendous. You go in there at the wrong time on a Saturday afternoon and you can't get past the greeting card aisle due to the lines.
ReplyDeleteNow as far as the Pathmark across the highway was concerned, their volume from what I hear had dropped considerably over the past ten years due to bad store management- both with operations and cleanliness. The A&P was actually starting to outdraw the Pathmark and since that Pathmark was getting close to 40 (maybe 50) years old, maybe it was time to get rid of it.
I also don't think the situation was helped when the miles-long Route 46 project zone took away two-thirds of the access to the shopping center. Before, you used to be able to get into the Pathmark strip right off of Route 46, but they closed the entrance ramp off and make you go in at the far end of the lot by Kohl's. They then took out the exit/entrance from Browertown Road near the highway so they could make the exit ramp wider, and now the only way you can get into the store other than the highway is to come in off of Browertown behind the stores.
Now
Yes, good point about the entrance... I forgot they blocked that entrance off rt. 46 so you had to come in thru Kohls and the browertown entrance got pushed back behind the stores; that must have had some impact on volume for sure, and I believe the store was expanded or renovated in the mid 1990's, but probably just faltered the past several years.
DeleteGUman, two things:
ReplyDelete1) I think it expanded once in the early '90s but the mid 90s saw a pretty drastic remodel- if you know the Botany Plaza Pathmark's setup, it kinda looked like that with the exception being that the service departments and produce were all not in the same general area. But the first five aisles were for health and beauty aids, cleaning supplies, and paper products and they were laid out kind of like the back aisles of that monstrosity of a Shop Rite across the highway. Don't know how many stores kept this layout (I live up the street from Clifton's other Pathmark and they actually scrapped that layout after putting it in once they expanded).
2) There used to be four means of access to that strip. You had the two that got cutoff, then the one by Kohl's and the one where everyone is fed to now coming out of the back by where they put Modell's in. I'm just surprised that no one apparently made an effort to find a secondary way in that wouldn't cause so much trouble but apparently that isn't the case.
Does anyone know the property owner of the Acme in Manasquan NJ? I am trying to contact the family. I use to have a number but my contact has past away and now its in another family memebers hands.
ReplyDeleteMy email sbattista@jefferyrealty.com
When the A&P in Garfield closes I wonder what they should put in it's place? If you know what should go into the former A&P PLEASE REPLY!
ReplyDeleteI Found Out, It's Now A PriceRite. Below Is A Link For A Pic
Deletehttp://www.thegoldsteingroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/tgg_pr_priceright_070714.jpg