TOUR: Ebenezer Groceries - Ephrata, PA

Ebenezer Groceries

Owner: Jonah Dodd

Opened: 2002

Cooperative: none
Location: 465 N Reading Rd, Ephrata, PA

Photographed: August 20, 2019

One more salvage grocery store in the Lancaster County area for us to see, and it's this one, Ebenezer Groceries! (Obviously there are many more I haven't been to yet, but this is the last one I have visited.) This store is located just outside of Ephrata, PA and appears to be around 30,000 square feet.

It's in the front part of a light industrial building with a few other tenants, and it's a nice place with high ceilings, not to mention that it appears to be relatively newly-renovated. We see a lot of new fixtures, freshly painted walls, new carts, and so on. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be matched with an improved product mix. I found Ebenezer's selection to be even more idiosyncratic than most salvage grocery stores, with general product quality being lower. Produce was noticeably worse than some of the other stores we visited.

There is a selection of HABA and other nonfoods here, too.

But there doesn't seem to be much of a flow or organization to the grocery department. There's large blocks of the same product, meaning that the selection is quite limited here. Even if Sharp Shopper has equally large blocks of product, that store is three times the size of this.

Towards the back of the store, there is a meat/deli department including a service deli counter, which I was not expecting. There's also a small selection of packaged meats.

In a refrigerated room at the back is the produce department. It doesn't look too bad here, but when I looked at the products specifically it's clear they are not getting the turnover they need here.

Dairy department at the back, too.

I like the brightly colored walls and the polished concrete floors, but that's not going to make customers come back over and over again -- that's product mix, quality, and pricing.

See if we look at the below picture, we can see that Ebenezer is much nicer and more modern-looking than the other discount supermarkets around here, which is why I had high hopes.

We exit through a nonfoods department with a few registers at the front of the store.

That's all for Ephrata, and we're also almost done with the Lancaster area. Tomorrow we'll be taking a look at a store on the way to Reading here on The Independent Edition, before we move on to Reading itself!