1001 E. Pulaski Highway
Welcome to the Elkton Food Lion!
It's our first time in Maryland! The Free State is home to a wide variety of supermarkets like Giant Food, Shoppers, Harris Teeter, and Wegmans. It also has 52 Food Lions, and we'll be seeing one today! Food Lion opened its Elkton location in 1999 as the anchor of Elkton Crossing. As you can see, this store is a very traditional Food Lion location built in the '90s. It wasn't until 2006 that they updated to this design, which is still used for new stores built today. The chain modernizes their decor much more frequently than that, though, as we'll see when we head inside this store.
The bakery and deli are just to your right as you proceed through the grand aisle. Food Lion is the only major chain I know of that still has the bakery and deli combined.
Produce and breakfast meats are in the corner. Currently, this store has the Easy, Fresh & Affordable (EFA) 3.0 decor, which we also saw in Claymont and seems to be quite a common sight in Food Lions today. Before that, the store seemed to have an odd combination of Millennium (which it opened with) and a cheap or transitional version of Quality & Value. I've never seen it before, but here's what it looked like.
The back of the store is home to meat and seafood. Doesn't seem like a ton of meat was in stock here.
The back wall space not taken up by the meat department is used for frozen foods, and dairy is in the last aisle of the store. I think that sign to the right of "Dairy" is probably the only recorded usage of the phrase "creamy and affordable goodness".
Other Images of Interest
Street View Images
2023
Google doesn't really have many good angles of this shopping center. They've only been through it once. Food Lion is definitely the star tenant, being joined by various small restaurants and a vape shop.
2014
2014 must have been a low point for this store. Look at that parking lot! The store seemed quite busy when I was there.
Nearby competition
2.0 miles away: Acme of Elkton
Next week's store is the Acme of Elkton, one of six Acme locations in the state of Maryland. This one opened in 1976 as the main anchor of the Big Elk Mall, later being joined two years later by a Kmart. It's the second-oldest Maryland Acme in operation, after only the Chestertown store, which opened in 1967. It was expanded in the '90s and got the facade upgrade you see here. The decor has been updated more recently than that, but, as we'll see, it's certainly not Acme's newest decor!
2.1 miles away: Redner's of Elkton
We'll then be seeing our first Redner's, a discount chain that mostly operates in east-central Pennsylvania, but has a growing number of locations in Delaware and Maryland. This location in particular opened in 2005.
3.4 miles away: Safeway of Glasgow
And last week, we walked around the Glasgow Safeway. It opened in 1997 as a Genuardi's, and has been operating under the Safeway name since 2004. Currently, it's one of only three Safeways left in Delaware, along with Dover and Rehoboth Beach. There are numerous locations in Maryland, but moreso in the Baltimore area than on the Eastern Shore.
That's all for this tour! This was a nice store. It's nothing revolutionary, but I think that's a big part of Food Lion. Most of the stores are the same, with clean, streamlined aisles, simple decor, and "extra low prices". The history of decor for this store is quite interesting, as well. If you have any more information about it, please let me know! Like I said, I've never seen the version of Quality & Value that this store had, and it being mixed together with Millennium makes it even more interesting. Thanks for reading! This is our home. That's our The Retail Connection.
Boy do I love when things are both creamy *and* affordable!
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to the upcoming posts as well!
That's the best combination!
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