Pathmark Shuts Down Church Road Store

The end came quietly for Pathmark on Church Road.

After a week of a blitz of sales, the only things left when the doors permanently shut Friday were empty shelves and a half-dozen paper signs taped to the windows:
“We would like to thank all our loyal customers who shopped here over the years!” one read.

Loyal customers weren’t enough to keep the store from being marked as underperforming, however, and 123 people at the Church Road store were officially out of a job Friday morning.

Union officials said some employees of the Cherry Hill store and two others—in Camden and Edgewater Park—could be able to transfer to other Pathmark locations, but those are a small minority.

The store’s owners, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., which also runs Superfresh, have stayed silent on the closures, only acknowledging them to employees and declining to return repeated requests for comment.

Though Pathmark’s departure leaves a sizable hole in the 190,000-square-foot shopping center it helped anchor, Cherry Hill officials said there’s a good chance there could be a new tenant in the near future, though they haven’t named anyone specifically.

“We don’t think it’s going to sit vacant very long,” township spokeswoman Bridget Palmer said.

The Camden and Cherry Hill stores are the latest additions to the list A&P has shut down in the area recently, including the Pathmark in Lawnside, which was reopened as a ShopRite, and the SuperFresh in Westmont Plaza in Haddon Township, which closed over the winter.