Look Inside: Park Avenue Market - Easton, PA

Park Avenue Market

Owner: Victor Ricci

Opened: 1960s-2021

Cooperative: none
Location: 2468 Park Ave, Easton, PA

Photographed: January 8, 2021

Welcome to Easton, our final stop in our journey through the Lehigh Valley! Easton is the smallest of the three cities that make up most of the Lehigh Valley (the other two being Allentown and Bethlehem), and so we won't spend that much time here in Easton. Our first stop is to the northwest of town, and it was a grocery store from around the 1960s through last year when it appears to have been sold and it's now the Parkk Ave Smoke Outlet & Exotics, which is definitely not what the store was when I visited.

The 7600 square foot space, as we can see, appears to have been expanded around an original residential building, and is now very long and thin. When I visited, there were a few long grocery aisles with frozen on the left side, deli and meat on the back wall, and dairy and produce on the right side.

Let's head in. We can see where the expansions happened, mostly from the differences in ceiling height.

As we can see, it's a strange middle ground between a full supermarket and a convenience store. It's got a little bit of each of the key categories, but it's not really a full supermarket since most of the grocery items are snack items, like the ice cream and chips you see here.

It felt a little bit like the selection of a large convenience store in the space of a small supermarket. Clearly that formula wasn't working for them, hence the change to Smoke Outlet.

The deli and meat departments are at the far back of the store.

You can see there were still some grocery staples when I visited, but not much.

Dairy and produce (relatively limited selections of each) on the right side of the store, which makes up the last aisle. It's a little bit sad to see the store in this shape, since clearly not too long ago it was a very nice small supermarket with a full line of grocery products, and now it's just a smoke shop. I suppose they know their business, but I hate to see an independent grocery store being turned into something like that. Anyway, there is still a supermarket about half a mile east on Nazareth Road, which we'll be touring on Monday on The Market Report!