A Soon to Be Stopped Tops

 

    As fate would have it, the timing of recent announcement that 12 Tops locations will be sold off to C&S Wholesale Grocers worked out in my favor. I had already planned to be traveling through Cortland this past weekend, so a quick stop into the Cortland Tops was able to occur. Cortland is among the larger of the 12 locations that will soon be rebranded into a revived Grand Union. 

    This location was built as a Tops, so it has the standard Tops layout of the era. Let's take a look:

It'll be interesting to see what changes Grand Union makes, if any....

Former Kmart #7725

 NOTE: This post comes from outside the blog's coverage area.

    This month's Kmart tour takes us to the only Kmart store that I visited in Delaware. Although, there were a few other locations in Delaware, this was the only one that got my attention simply for three reasons:

1.     The other Delaware stores had been covered by others. Although sometimes there was overlap in documentation, (such as this store) I felt I didn't need to visit the other locations. This location is unique in the fact that is
2. the only mainland U.S. Kmart store that shrank due to being a part of Seritage. All the other Seritage owned properties in the continental states would close. Although a second location in Olean, NY almost happened.
3.     The second location mentioned happened to be my local Kmart for the longest time. I wanted to visit Rehoboth Beach to see what could of happened locally.

    This particular Kmart shrunk to make room for Petsmart and Christmas Tree Shop's 'and That!' concept. The location (a 90s built large format store) basically was shrunk in half from the usual around 120,000 sq. ft. store to somewhere in the ballpark of 54,000 to 58,000 sq. ft. 

    Due to the shrinking, pretty much all departments were shrunk as well. Hardware and automotive being effected the most- basically half an aisle for each. One other unique thing that this store had going for ir was that the Avis/Budget rental space continued to operate in the shrunken space as well. The new small store would close in February 2020. The space would be further divided, as an Aldi would come to open a new location here.