TOUR: The Richmond Shops IGA - Fishtown, Philadelphia, PA

The Richmond Shops IGA
Owner: John Hallinan Jr

Opened: 2016 as IGA, 1998-2016 as Thriftway

Cooperative: IGA
Location: 2497 Aramingo Ave, Fishtown, Philadelphia, PA

Photographed: December 2021

Welcome to Fishtown! Or Port Richmond, or East Kensington, whichever neighborhood you choose to believe this supermarket is in. The 40,000 square foot store was built in the 80s with its strip mall as a Thriftway, which operated as the Port Richmond Thriftway until 2016 when the Thriftway/Shop n Bag cooperative went under. (Random side note, Allegiance/Foodtown now seems to have the rights to both names; we know they had the rights to SNB but they've recently added Thriftway to their "brand portfolio".) At that point, they joined Retail Marketing Group, a subgroup of IGA.

Since the store previously operated as just Thriftway, it would make sense if they switched to just IGA. For whatever reason, they chose to instead rebrand to this odd combination of a website address and an abbreviation, but I refuse to call the store TheRichmondShops.com IGA. It'll have to be The Richmond Shops IGA, but I'm not even sure what that means. Here's the store soon after the switch to IGA. Nighttime pictures aside, we can see the outside of the store has been redone with a new facade and a new glass-enclosed foyer, which is quite nice. Here it is during the day.

Heading in, we see that the store is not too big but quite substantial. We'll see the store in detail as we tour around, but big picture, I was genuinely impressed with this store. It's not fancy, but it's a very solid supermarket. I found the selection to be excellent (including a fantastic selection of locally made produts), and the prices to be very good. One other note before we tour, the interior decor package we see here was part of a small refresh shortly after the store became IGA around 2017.

The bakery is immediately to the right of the entrance. Prepared foods and deli line the right side of the grand aisle, with seafood and butcher at the back. Meats continue along the back wall, with frozen on one side each of the second-to-last and last aisles. Dairy lines the outside of the last aisle, with beer/wine and addition frozen in the front left corner.

Here's a look at the produce department. The store isn't huge, but they did a good job of merchandising with specialty, organic, and international produce here. I wasn't necessarily expecting that, but they did it well.

Here's prepared foods and deli, mostly closed up for the night. We also have the Asian Food Island on the left, featuring sushi, hot Chinese food, and Korean dumplings and sides. Again, a very nice touch that I wasn't expecting to find here. We'll see that the owners seem to take very good care of the store, since everything we see is on the older side but spotlessly maintained.

Here's the deli and service seafood counter. In the 2017 (or so) remodel, we can see that the decor was mostly repainted, but it's looking very good.

Here's a look across the back wall, with meat and milk on the back. Again, we can tell that the flooring is older but very shiny and nicely refinished.

We definitely feel like we're in a big supermarket here, despite the fact that it's not a huge store.

Large HABA selection, but no pharmacy, if I remember correctly. Something interesting I've never seen before...

This is a full display of Seven Farms organic products in the natural food area, so that all the storebrand items are in one place. Very nice! Good prices on these items here too.

Back on the back wall. We can see the beginning of the dairy department ahead.

Opposite the milk case is the first aisle of freezers...

I mentioned that this store has a lot of local products. In fact, here's a banner hanging in the back of the store highlighting some of their local suppliers.

And more local suppliers to see in the milk area (although, of course, most milk sold in supermarkets is local to the store)...

And in the last aisle we have dairy and frozen. Fixtures are older, but have been updated.

And here's a look across the front end, with the relatively new beer/wine area behind a row of lower coffin freezer cases that look quite new. I would assume that this area used to be all frozen foods before the beer/wine area was installed.

Obligatory aisle 12 shot, but also we can see here that the store has 12 aisles in total.

And a look across the front end before we move on. Overall, I was quite impressed with this IGA, and I would certainly return to shop anytime! Well, anytime I was in the area. On Monday we move on to Wissinoming, for another supermarket I'd certainly do my shopping at anytime. Check it out on The Market Report! (P.S. I have two updates this weekend, with one on Grocery Archaeology tomorrow and Sunday's here on The Independent Edition.)