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LIDL Supermarket and Big Lots CONFIRMED for Glassboro’s Former K-Mart Store (Collegetown Shopping Center)

LIDL Supermarket and Big Lots CONFIRMED for Glassboro’s Former K-Mart Store (Collegetown Shopping Center)
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Now this is some exciting news and somewhat kicking myself for not finding this before my last post on the shopping center.  Oh well, I’ll get twice the traffic, ha.   Property owner Brixmor themselves have unknowingly confirmed LIDL supermarket and a relocated Big Lots are 2 of the three larger stores coming in to the closed K-Mart location!!  From our prior post we shared that K-mart’s 100,000+ sq feet will be split into 4 stores. Three larger stores across the front and one smaller in the back.  LIDL would be positioned in the front left 1/3 and Big Lots next to them in the center.

How did 42Freeway find this?  Well as I sit at home drinking my morning coffee today and doing online research, I decided to take at look at Brixmor’s quarterly financial statements.  Each financial quarter, stock market traded companies have an investor “earnings” conference where they update on sales, revenue and big company changes…. and then this information is written out for investors.

And there it is… sitting out there on the interwebs since October 2019:

Redevelopment of former Kmart with a 40K SF Big Lots, a 25K SF LIDL and an additional junior anchor; construction of multi-tenant outparcel buildings; and shopping center upgrades including façade renovations, parking reconfiguration, and pylon sign and lighting enhancements

These reports are highly analyzed and regulated.  A company won’t list new leases or changes in these quarterly reports if it wasn’t rock solid legit.

Lidl and Big Lots

Well Big Lots is easy to explain… Glassboro already has one.  Discount home goods store?  I literally just walked through the Glassboro store for the first time last week.  So it seems they will be moving across the street to this newly remodeled shopping center.  And yes it will probably leave an empty store over at the other shopping center (which already has a big emptiness from the closed Sears hardware).  Why would they do this?  Foot traffic.  Supermarkets have a constant flow of people walking in and being positioned next to them the expectation is a percentage of those shoppers will come into Big Lots

Lidl is newer to this area.  They have a store in Vineland and one in Cherry Hill is close to opening.  It’s a German based grocer similar in size and style of Aldi.  I visited the Vineland store and saw they also had a large area dedicated to bins of household goods.  It was nice, bright and clean.  Food, groceries, vegetables…  but in a small more manageable store size.  What impressed me the most was their bakery.  They had some really nice baked-in-the-store baked products.   Lidl’s most widely known news in our area though has been what they haven’t done.  They spent millions on property in Mantua, and never built. The got approval for two locations in Gloucester Township and haven’t turned over a shovel full of dirt.  They were advertised as coming to a planned shopping center in Turnersville.   And they recently got approval for another store on the White Horse Pike in Somerdale.

With the soon to open Cherry Hill Lidl store… does it mark the start of more LIDL stores coming to our area?

And yes, there already is an Aldi and Shop-rite across the street.. so this will make for tough competition!

NOTE TO OTHER MEDIA OUTLETS:  This is truly a 42Freeway exclusive.  I clearly describe how I uncovered this.  If you run with your version of the story… even if you say “well we talked to the Mayor”… it is still a 42Freeway scoop and out of professional courtesy I would expect the article to say “as first reported at area retail news site 42Freeway.com