The Independent Edition

The Gladwyne Market Owner: Renee Riccio Opened:  2009 under current ownership, early 1900s previously Cooperative:  none Location:  359 Righters Mill Rd, Gladwyne, PA Photographed:  December 2021 We start our look at Pennsylvania with this unique store, in the small town of Gladwyne about nine miles northwest of Center City Philadelphia. As we might expect from the name on the front, The Gladwyne Market House (referred to now as simply the Gladwyne Market most places) is, well, a market in a house. In fact, the Gladwyne Market takes up about 1400 square feet of the ground floor of this house, in what seems to be a very historically-preserved location. This store has continuously operated as a grocery store for over 100 years, but in 2009, it was acquired by the owners of The Market of Lafayette Hill about three and a half miles north. Gladwyne is a community of 4000 with a median household income of around $160,000, so this store is naturally both very small and ver...

It's time to enter Pennsylvania! If you got a little bored with my coverage of the mid-Atlantic region (and, I'll admit, there were a fair number of pretty boring stores and bad drive-by pictures, especially in Norfolk), now is the time to tune back in. We are back, just west of New Jersey, in the Philadelphia area! We're going to begin our coverage in the eastern part of the Main Line, a stretch of Philadelphia suburbs along US-30, which is the Lincoln Highway. In that area, we'll make stops in Gladwyne, Bryn Mawr, Wynnewood, and Narberth before entering the Philadelphia city limits for a look at stores around Carroll Park, Cathedral Park, and University City. My coverage of Philadelphia is not quite as dense as northern New Jersey nor northeastern Pennsylvania, but it's pretty solid, and we certainly have quite a few interesting stops as we move through the area from south to north, roughly. We begin with a look at a very small independent grocer in Gladwyne here ...

Todos Supermarket Owner: Kevin Yun Opened:  2020 Cooperative:  none Location:  5521 Leesburg Pk, Bailey's Crossroads, VA Photographed:  December 2021 Contributor:  L. D. This local chain of international supermarkets made its home in the roughly 40,000 square foot former location of Toys R Us in early 2020. The store was announced in 2019, and sparked a fair amount of controversy -- much of it centering on what type of supermarket, exactly, Food Star is. See the comments here . I don't see many or any TRU remnants inside, nor do I see any secondhand items from other stores. It's a fairly generic , but plenty attractive, interior. This is unfortunately our single independent store in the DC area, and tomorrow we see our final DC suburb store over on The Market Report !

  We are continuing our northbound trek from Charleston, South Carolina to [redacted], Maine (ooh, did I leak confidential future plans??) by making a few stops in the DC and Baltimore areas! Now I must admit that it's been quite some time since I was last in these areas myself, and I don't have a lot of grocery stores photographed in this region myself. So this group is interesting in that it's entirely made up of contributor-submitted posts! In fact, the bulk of the pictures in the DC suburbs that we'll start with come to us courtesy of, um, my former roommate's girlfriend's best friend's cousin. No, I'm not exaggerating. We'll be spending a few days in the western and southern suburbs of Washington DC, moving from west to east passing through McLean, Arlington, Falls Church, Bailey's Crossroads, and Alexandria, VA, , then making a single stop in DC itself, before jumping up to a southwestern suburb of Baltimore. And then we're on to Pennsy...

Green Way Markets Owner: Robin Estevez Opened:  February 2021 Cooperative:  Allegiance Retail Services Location:  112 N Maple Ave, Ridgewood, NJ Photographed:  June 2022 We return to the Green Way Markets of Ridgewood, which just finished its renovation after opening in a former Kings in early 2021. I was frustrated to see basically no change at the time of my December 2021 visit , even questioning whether the renovation was happening at all. Little did I know that in the weeks immediately following my visit the renovation did, in fact, begin in earnest. And it wrapped up in, I believe, late May when they held their grand reopening. I was very impressed with how the store looked when I went back just a few weeks ago, although the renovation was a little limited in scope. Quite the first impression, though! Check out the floor plan in the January post linked above. You'll see that the produce department and the liquor store are now side-by-side, rather than one in fr...

Ashley Marketplace Owner: Cheol Kim Opened:  2013 Cooperative:  none Location:  1 South Orange Ave, South Orange, NJ Photographed:  June 2022 We return to Ashley Marketplace after first seeing it back in the summer of 2018. Unfortunately, the past four years have not been kind to the gourmet supermarket and cafe, with a visit last week showing the store clearly struggling. By the way, the store closed for a few weeks in 2019 "for renovation," but reopened shortly thereafter with no apparent changes. At some point between the summer of 2020 and the summer of 2022, the store did in fact make some major changes to its layout and selection. We're going to take a trip through the somewhat mazelike store from the back entrance, facing the parking garage. The produce department is actually looking really good with the newly streamlined setup, until we start noticing the shelves and shelves of bottled water in what used to be a produce cooler on the right. Also, oddly eno...