TOUR: Weiser's Market - Akron, PA

Weiser's Market
Owner: Tim Weiser

Opened: 1998

Cooperative: none
Location: 805 Main St, Akron, PA

Photographed: August 20, 2019

Although we've been seeing a lot of really large independent supermarkets, there are smaller independent supermarkets too. The town of Akron, PA, with a population of around 4000, has one supermarket and it's the 7000 square foot Weiser's Market in the middle of town.

The store opened in 1998, but has been a supermarket for long before that. As we see, it's an old building that's been fixed up a bit with some new fixtures and fresh paint on the walls. The flooring might be much older terrazzo, though.

Produce lines the first aisle, with meat and deli on the back wall (pictured above). Dairy and frozen are in the last aisle, with baked goods on the front wall -- although products are definitely baked in-store, there's no service bakery department. As we'll see, there are two registers that actually run perpendicular to the grocery aisles rather than parallel.

Like many of the other independent supermarkets around here, we see the shelves beautifully stocked and the floor perfectly clean, even if the facility is older.

There is some much older wood paneling around the store, but much of it has been painted over. It looks like these meat cases have been updated, but maybe not replaced.

Here's the service deli in the back corner.

Plenty of nonfoods, too, for a very small space. We can tell how small the store is from the very narrow aisles.

The front of the dairy department in the front of the last aisle, with frozen next to that...

Here, too, the fixtures have been updated but the bones are older.

And moving over towards the front end, we see the baked goods shelving straight ahead with the registers behind the Coke case on the right.

One more look down a grocery aisle before we move on. This store was also an AWI member and still uses Best Yet items from C&S.

And lots of homemade baked goods here in the front of the store! Registers are behind this shelving, and in an unconventional setup, they face the side wall rather than the front...

Above, we can see the entrance and exit doors right beyond the registers, with produce off to the left side. Weiser's has a second store in Lititz, where we saw Oregon Dairy (and where I haven't been, unfortunately), so I'll have to go back someday. Up next we're headed to Ephrata, a larger town of about 13,000 to the northeast about two and a half miles, and we'll be spending about a week there (there are several supermarkets in Ephrata!). Our first stop is on the west end of town on The Market Report tomorrow!