For most of the last two years, if you lived within walking distance of Richmond and Laurel in Point Pleasant Beach and needed milk, you didn't walk. You drove to Brick or Toms River, or you pieced together a shopping list from three or four small specialty shops scattered around Arnold and Bay Avenue. The Stop & Shop that used to anchor that corner went dark in 2024, and the building sat there through two full summer seasons, its parking lot mostly empty while the rest of downtown filled with visitors.
That gap ended on July 24, 2026, when a store called The Market of Point Pleasant Beach held its grand opening at 505 Richmond Avenue. The name is almost aggressively plain, and that's not an accident. What opened this summer isn't the store the town was told to expect, and the difference says something about how grocery chains actually operate at the Jersey Shore that most of us never have a reason to notice until the sign outside our own supermarket changes twice in one year.
Eighty Years, One Corner, Five Names
If you've lived in Point Pleasant Beach long enough, you've done your grocery shopping at this exact address under a rotating cast of banners without necessarily registering the pattern. The corner has functioned as a grocery store, in one form or another, since roughly the 1940s.
| Era | Name | What Happened |
|---|---|---|
| 1940s–1960s | ACME | Original tenant on the site |
| 1960s–1970s | Foodtown | Chain conversion |
| 1970s–2011 | Norkus Foodtown | Locally operated Foodtown franchise |
| 2011–2024 | Stop & Shop | Norkus sold its stores to Stop & Shop |
| 2024–2026 | Vacant | First extended gap in the corner's history |
| 2026–present | The Market of Point Pleasant Beach | Independent operator, new banner |
Every one of those transitions before 2024 was a same-day handoff: one grocer's name came down, another's went up, and the shelves kept moving. The two-year stretch after Stop & Shop closed was the anomaly, not the norm, which is part of why Mayor Doug Vitale framed the reopening the way he did, telling the community they were thrilled to welcome The Market of Point Pleasant Beach back to town.
What the Signs Promised, and What Actually Opened
Here's the part that only makes sense if you were paying attention back in the spring. When the lease was first announced, the incoming tenant was reported as The Food Emporium, a grocery banner known in New York City for its natural and organic focus, with locations as far as Marlboro Township. Residents who follow these things were told a Food Emporium was coming to the old Stop & Shop box.
That's not what opened. The store is independently owned and operated by Shap Markets, run by Adam Shapiro, and it's the company's fifth location in New Jersey. Shap Markets does operate under the Food Emporium name at a couple of its other stores, including one in Waldwick, because those locations are affiliated with Key Food, which holds the rights to that branding. The Point Pleasant Beach store isn't part of that arrangement. It falls under the Associated Supermarket Group instead, and because ASG doesn't carry the Food Emporium name rights, the store opened as the far more generic "The Market of Point Pleasant Beach." Whether the other Shap-run stores eventually follow the same path toward the plainer name is still an open question, but for now, Point Pleasant Beach ended up with a different kind of grocer than the one the early announcement described, even though it's the same company behind the counter.
Overall, the size and format is modest by supermarket standards, at a little over 18,000 square feet, with produce, meat, seafood, dairy, frozen foods, pantry staples and prepared foods rounding out the aisles. It's not a big-box replacement for the old Stop & Shop footprint. It's closer to a full-service neighborhood grocer built to cover the basics.
Who's Actually Shopping There
One detail that's easy to miss if you only think about this as a Point Pleasant Beach story: the grand opening was expected to draw shoppers from well beyond the borough, including Point Pleasant, Brielle, Bay Head, Manasquan, Brick and Toms River. That's a wider radius than a single-town grocery gap usually pulls from, and it reflects something true about this stretch of Route 35 and Richmond Avenue. It's one of the few full-service supermarket options serving that whole cluster of shore towns, which is exactly why its two-year absence was felt well past the borough line, and why its return matters to more than just the people who live within walking distance.
"We are thrilled to welcome The Market of Point Pleasant Beach to our community."
The Gap Didn't Sit Empty. It Got Filled Piecemeal.
None of this means Point Pleasant Beach went without food shopping entirely between 2024 and 2026. It just meant the shopping got split across a handful of specialty businesses instead of consolidated under one roof, which is a different kind of inconvenience than an outright desert.
During the gap, a resident could still put together most of a week's groceries by making the rounds:
- Downtown Market and JBH Catering on Arnold Avenue, for butcher-counter meats, deli and prepared foods
- Spikes Fish Market on Broadway, for fresh seafood
- Shore Fresh Seafood Market on Bridge Avenue
- Co-op Seafood on Channel Drive
- Point Lobster Company on Saint Louis Avenue
That's an unusually deep bench of independent seafood and butcher shops for a town this size, and it's part of why the grocery gap felt more like a missing piece than a missing category. The specialty shops covered protein and prepared foods well. What they couldn't replicate was the one-stop trip for pantry staples, dairy, produce and everything else that a full-service supermarket handles in a single aisle run.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
The practical shift for residents is straightforward: the errand loop that got broken in 2024 is whole again, and it's back at the same corner most of us default to out of habit. A few things worth knowing if you haven't been downtown in a while:
- The Market of Point Pleasant Beach sits at 505 Richmond Avenue, the same building that housed Stop & Shop and, before that, Norkus Foodtown.
- Downtown's broader retail calendar has kept moving even without a full grocery anchor. The Chamber of Commerce's Sidewalk Sale Days ran August 14 through 17 this year along Arnold and Bay Avenue.
- The Chamber's Festival of the Sea marked its 48th year in 2026, with roughly 250 craft vendors, live music and a beer and wine garden drawing crowds downtown.
- Ladies Night Out remains a seasonal fixture, with shops along Arnold and Bay Avenue staying open late and serving refreshments to anyone strolling the two blocks.
None of these events depended on the grocery store being open, which is worth remembering. Downtown Point Pleasant Beach kept functioning as a shopping and dining destination through the gap. What changed this July is that it stopped requiring a drive to Brick or Toms River for the basics, and started requiring, at most, a walk or a short drive to the same corner it always used for that purpose.
If you've been putting off a proper look around the neighborhood, or you're weighing what day-to-day life actually looks like in Point Pleasant versus a few towns over, I keep a running set of neighborhood notes like this one on the Point Pleasant page, along with similar dispatches for Brielle and Toms River if you're comparing more than one shore town. And if you're further along and starting to think about what your own home might be worth in this market, I'm always glad to talk it through. You can reach Dominick Leone directly through the site whenever you're ready.
