A Saturday Adventure at Fairway Market

Fairway bills itself as a store "like no other market." Visiting the Paramus Fairway one rainy weekend, we had to agree. Pushing through the crowded aisles while craning to see the product signs atop warehouse-like shelving is a bigger challenge than you’ll find at other markets.

So is threading through the maze-like design of the store. Take a wrong turn, and you are back where you started.

And if you expect to find all brands of a particular product in one place, guess again. One brand, like Tide, is in one place. The other detergents are elsewhere. Take notes if you want to compare prices. 

We passed one man pushing his cart and complaining to his wife, "Pasta is in 12 different places here. You need a #%&@*$! map to find anything."

Since I was still trying to figure out where they hid the orange juice, I had to agree.

I asked a clerk where the Tropicana was. "I think maybe it’s in aisle 12." It was there, but Fairway apparently does not carry the gallon size containers I need.

Despite all the complaints, I did find some good things at Fairway. Last time I was there, it was charging a dollar more than Stop & Shop for my favorite Compari tomatoes.  This time I got three packages for $5, although it took a few minutes to find packages without tomatoes that had not started to blacken from old age. 

Three for five is no bargain if you wind up throwing too many out.

But the frisee was the freshest I’ve ever purchased outside a farmer’s market or my own garden. Frisee is an acquired taste (my daughter hates it), but I acquired it a long time ago and am always on the lookout for this slightly bitter, prickly green. And I was willing to pay the very steep $6.99 a pound since nobody buys a full a pound of frisee except possibly a certain Ridgewood restauranteur.

Fairway has one of the widest selections of greens that I’ve ever seen, but they are scattered in no less than four different places. To find the frisee, you want to turn right at the entrance and continue around the perimeter until you get to the third spot with leafy greens. But the big selection, even scattered, is one of the store’s attractions for me. There may be others hidden away in the maze.

Prices, in general, are good. My brand of cat litter is now 10 cents a bag cheaper than it is at Stop & Shop, which is the best out of all the Ridgewood stores. My favorite cat food is four cents a can cheaper unless Stop & Shop has it on sale, which it does frequently.

A pack of 12 "giant" rolls of Bounty towels was $14.99 at Fairway but only $13.99 at Stop & Shop.  On the pack of 15, regular size rolls, Fairway was a dime less—$16.39 versus $16.49 at Stop & Shop. 

(For the fun of it, I compared the number of sheets on giant (132) and regular (88) rolls. By buying the less expensive pack of giant rolls, you would get 264 more sheets of paper towels than you would if you bought the 15 regular rolls at the higher price.)

In the end, I did discover that there is a map for the maze. It is, however, at the customer service desk, which is at the opposite end of the maze from where you start. From the map you will learn that diapers, for example, are in aisle one, with cereal and cookies, and also in aisle eight with the baby food.

Shopping at Fairway is an adventure, and can be fun as long as you’ve got a couple of hours to enjoy it.