The first member-owned PriceRite discount store will open in Garfield, NJ, this summer, parent firm Wakefern said on April 15. It will also be the first PriceRite unit to operate in the Garden State.
The store will be owned by Inserra PriceRites, a division of Inserra Supermarkets, Mahwah, NJ, which owns 22 high volume ShopRite stores in New York and New Jersey. PriceRite’s other 54 stores are corporately-owned by Wakefern.
Late last month, PriceRite opened a new corporately-owned store in Rosedale, MD and has two other units currently under construction – in Hyattsville, MD and in Woodbridge, VA, which would be the firm’s first Virginia store.
The new Inserra’s PriceRite will be located at the site of a former 41,000 square feet A&P unit that closed in 2012. From its inception in 1995, the “extreme value” discounter has always opened stores and operated them as a separate unit of Wakefern.
By original plan, none of the PriceRite stores were designed to compete with the grocery co-op’s primary business, ShopRite supermarkets. That mindset began to change over the past 18 months as the landscape became more competitive and retailers with different formats began competing with the traditional ShopRite operators.
Over the past year, several of the co-op’s 50 members began leaking information that a possible change in strategy was being considered: that existing members could operate PriceRite units both as an internal growth mechanism and a means to protect themselves against new retail food competition. Additionally, last year Drexel Hill, PA-based retailer The Fresh Grocer joined Wakefern as its 50th member and also sold the “Fresh Grocer” name to Wakefern. With control of the name, Wakefern now could offer its current members or lure potential new members with the promise that another diversified format could be offered, this one more perishables-driven, but still smaller than the conventional ShopRite model.
“I am so excited and grateful to have been given this opportunity by my family to open an Inserra PriceRite in Garfield,” said Lawrence Inserra III, president of Inserra PriceRites . “Our family has been in the grocery business for 60 years and they have left me with an amazing blueprint, which has taught me to always take care of the people you work with and for. I look forward to working with an incredible team for an incredible town and hope that amongst a variety of competition, our quality, price and people attract the community to PriceRite.”
In other Wakefern news, the Keasbey, NJ based distributor officially cut the ribbon at its new grocery warehouse in Elizabeth, NJ on April 17.
The 524,000 square foot facility replaces a former Wakefern facility at the same site but increases its capacity by 58 percent, the wholesaler noted. The new distribution center will inventory and dray both perishable and non-perishable items to about 250 ShopRite, PriceRite and The Fresh Grocer stores in nine states.
In June 2011, Wakefern transitioned its non-perishable operations to a temporary facility in Carteret, NJ, to allow for the demolition and subsequent reconstruction of its original grocery warehouse in Elizabeth, which was built in the late 1950s.