Getting here is less of a circus for many customers, says Joe Azzolina Sr.
By LINDA G. RASTELLI
Local supermarket magnate Joe Azzolina Sr. has purchased the Stop & Shop on Newman Springs Road in Shrewsbury and is reconfiguring it into another Food Circus Super Foodtown, much like the one he owns about half a mile away in Red Bank.
“Trying to get into Red Bank from (Route) 520 is like driving into hell,” the former state Assemblyman tells redbankgreen. Residents of Tinton Falls, Shrewsbury and Lincroft — as well as from Holmdel and Colts Neck — had asked him to open a store more convenient to where they live, he said.
“We weren’t drawing enough business in our Red Bank store from those areas,” he said. “It was to hard to get to our Red Bank store.”
The Stop & Shop wasnÂ’t doing the amount of business it had hoped to at its present location, he said, but heÂ’s confident that after remerchandising the store, heÂ’ll be able to expand the storeÂ’s market and sell more perishables than it did in the past.
“It will mostly be the same departments, but we’ll reconfigure the store our way,” he noted, adding that all the Stop & Shop employees were welcome to work for him.
The store will be closed for eight or nine days after the end of this month and then reopen on Dec. 8th as a Foodtown, he said. This will bring the total number of Foodtowns owned by his company, Food Circus Supermarkets, Inc., of Middletown, to 11.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, and none of the paperwork has yet been posted on the Monmouth County Clerk’s website.
