Food Lion | Elkton, MD

 

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.

Various cooking and baking essentials in aisle 4.

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".

Customer service and checkouts along the front.

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.

Food Lion | Claymont, DE

 

3609 Philadelphia Pike

Welcome to the Claymont Food Lion!

It's our first time inside a Food Lion here on The Retail Connection! During the 1990s, the North Carolina-based chain began expanding throughout the country, opening new stores as far west as Texas and Oklahoma, as far south as Florida, and as far north as Pennsylvania. There were even plans for expansion into states like Illinois when a controversy on meat quality sparked by a Primetime Live report caused sales to decline, and the chain eventually retreated from all new markets except central Pennsylvania and Delaware, where stores continue to operate to this day. This particular Food Lion opened on August 26, 2009 in what was originally an A&P that later became a SuperFresh before moving down the street in 2000. The Food Lion opened with the chain's Rutherfordton decor, but now operates with Easy Fresh & Affordable 3.0, which we'll be seeing today. Let's head inside and get our lion's share!

The produce department is in the front right corner. Because of this store being a 70s A&P (which actually has a similar design in terms of the vestibule to purpose-built Food Lions), you have to walk past the registers to get to the grand aisle. Also for that reason, all of the departments in this store are quite small.

The deli-bakery is next, combined into one department in true Food Lion fashion. For being so basic, I actually really enjoy this decor.

No service department for meat and seafood, but it's in the back right corner past the deli-bakery counter.

Dairy products, ingredients that enrich meals, can be found along almost the entire back wall.

Paper products in aisle 7. The aisle markers are a high point of this decor for me. They're simple but look really good.

Frozen foods and ice cream run down the left side of the store. It gets really cramped once you get over here, but they still had a full selection.

Six checkout lanes and customer service under the front overhang. Even with all the lanes open, there were still lines! I was very surprised to see the store so busy, even on a Sunday morning.

Other Images of Interest

Street View Images

2020

This seems to have been during the remodel, as the main facade has the new colors but the rest of the store is still tan.

2017

Definitely still straight out of Rutherfordton, North Carolina here.

2007

Pre-Food Lion days here. To see photos inside the replacement SuperFresh when it was still open, click here.

Nearby competition

3.1 miles away: Acme of Foulk & Naamans

We're probably all familiar with this Acme by now. One thing I forgot to mention is that there was a Genuardi's across the street that opened in 1999 and later became a Safeway from 2004 until 2018. It had to close due to the Albertsons-Safeway merger, but I'm surprised they weren't forced to sell it off to another company to retain competition.

4.9 miles away: Acme of Boothwyn

Just barely meeting the criteria for nearby competition is the Boothwyn Acme, which we've seen in this section on several previous posts and toured back in October. It opened as SuperFresh in 1994, then was converted to Pathmark Sav-A-Center in 2008, then sold to Acme in 2015.

Thank you for reading this post! This was actually a much nicer store than I was expecting, and also quite busy. It's been the only supermarket in Claymont since SuperFresh's closure in 2015, so it is understandable. See you next week! This is our home. That's our The Retail Connection.