Bottom Dollar opening more stores in South Jersey
Bottom Dollar Food, the grocery chain that moved into the Philadelphia region 18 months ago with a deep-discount format and new stores across Southeastern Pennsylvania, announced Tuesday it would open four more stores in South Jersey.
Bottom Dollar Food, the grocery chain that moved into the Philadelphia region 18 months ago with a deep-discount format and new stores across Southeastern Pennsylvania, announced Tuesday it would open four more stores in South Jersey.
A store on Route 130 North in Cinnaminson was set to open Friday, and additional openings were planned through next year on West Browning Road in Bellmawr, Broad Street in Woodbury, and Route 38 in Mount Holly, the North Carolina-based company said. Dates for those openings had not been set.
The grocer already has locations in Marlton, Turnersville, Cherry Hill, Clementon, and Glassboro, among 20 sites across the region, since opening its first store locally in October 2010. Friday will mark the opening of its 21st store.
That's when the company laid its first stakes in the highly competitive Philadelphia market, hoping to appeal to penny-pinched shoppers with bare-bones displays, smaller-sized stores of about 18,000 square feet, and a blend of branded and no-frills groceries alongside ample offerings of perishables, to compete with fuller-sized supermarkets.
Many of its locations across the eight-county region are in suburban zip codes long associated with higher-income or firmly middle-class households that have come under spending pressures since the global financial crisis in late 2008 triggered what has remained stubbornly high unemployment.
Bottom Dollar is among others in the grocery industry banking on what is viewed as perhaps a permanent or longer-term downward shift in grocery spending by such households. The idea is to steal shoppers from chains like Acme or Wegmans, whose bigger stores carry higher overhead costs and which are not marketed as across-the-board discount grocers.
"We have been pleased with customer reaction to our current five stores in New Jersey and we are very excited to continue serving customers at our additional locations in the market," Bottom Dollar Food president Meg Ham said in a news release.