Drive Route 1 South through Edison today and the storefronts tell a different story than they did two years ago. The Petco sign is gone, replaced by a Boot Barn with racks of cowboy boots visible through the windows. A little further down, cars wrap around a building that used to be a bank, waiting for chicken fingers. Over on Route 27, the old Sam Ash Music building sits quiet, waiting on construction crews instead of guitar shoppers.
None of these changes happened in isolation, and none of them are random. Look at what left this corridor and what replaced it, and a pattern shows up that explains something residents have probably felt without being able to name: grocery shopping along Route 1 got a little harder over the past two years, while everything else got a lot more crowded.
The Same Address, a Different Business
Start with the clearest example. Petco's store at 1029 Route 1 South closed as part of a chain-wide pullback the company announced in the fall, one of 25 locations shutting down nationwide by the end of 2025. Edison pet owners were pointed to the Petco in Piscataway or the one in Parlin instead. Within months, Boot Barn had signed a lease for that exact address and opened its tenth New Jersey store there this spring, selling boots, flannel, and Western wear to a corridor that had never had a store like it before.
A few doors down, the same swap happened with a bank instead of a pet store. Raising Cane's took over the former Hanmi Bank building at 1031 Route 1 South, inside the Edison Crossroads Shopping Center, and opened on December 9. It was the chain's sixth restaurant in New Jersey and its first in Central Jersey, and the opening drew a line that started forming after 11 p.m. the night before, with customers camping out in temperatures that dropped into the teens for a shot at free chicken for a year. Local cheer squads performed at the ribbon cutting. It was, by any measure, a bigger event than a fast-food opening usually is.
Neither of these swaps needed new construction. Both businesses walked into buildings shaped for something else entirely and made it work, because what they needed from Route 1 wasn't a building. It was a windshield full of people driving past at 40 miles an hour.
A little west on Route 1, Wick Plaza picked up its own new tenant last September when Crispy Cones opened its first New Jersey location, bringing its rotisserie-grilled ice cream cones to a plaza already anchored by TJ Maxx and 99 Ranch Market. Mayor Sam Joshi showed up for the opening. It's a small addition next to the Boot Barn and Raising Cane's moves, but it fits the same shape: a national concept picking Edison's Route 1 frontage as a first-in-market address.
Here's the corridor's turnover at a glance:
| What Left | What Moved In | Address |
|---|---|---|
| Petco | Boot Barn (10th NJ location) | 1029 Route 1 South |
| Hanmi Bank | Raising Cane's (1st Central Jersey location) | 1031 Route 1 South, Edison Crossroads |
| Stop & Shop | Space not yet re-leased | 1049 Route 1 South |
| Stop & Shop | Space not yet re-leased | 1083 Inman Avenue |
| Sam Ash Music | Asian Fresh Market (approved, not yet open) | Route 27 near Plainfield Avenue |
Two of those five rows are still empty. The two Stop & Shop locations, one on Route 1 South and one on Inman Avenue, closed in the fall of 2024 as part of a ten-store cut across New Jersey attributed to underperformance. Unlike the Petco and bank buildings, nobody has announced a replacement for either yet.
Why Grocery Stores Lose These Corners
The reason isn't that nobody wants to sell groceries in Edison. It's that the specific parcels fronting Route 1 got repriced around a number that has nothing to do with how many people live nearby: how many cars pass the sign every day.
When the broker who handled the Sam Ash Music sale pitched that property to buyers, the number he led with wasn't Edison's population or income level. It was traffic. The Route 27 and Plainfield Avenue intersection where that building sits carries more than 50,000 vehicles a day. Meanwhile, commercial listing materials for Wick Plaza, a few miles away on Route 1, put that stretch of highway at over 90,000 vehicles daily, nearly double.
A supermarket doesn't need that kind of drive-by exposure. It survives on repeat trips from people who already live within a few minutes and come back every week whether or not the building is visible from the road. A drive-thru chicken counter or a Western wear store works differently. It needs to be seen, not just visited, by everyone passing through, whether they live in Edison or are just cutting across on the way to Woodbridge or New Brunswick. Route 1's highest-traffic corners are being priced for the second kind of business now, and grocery formats are having a harder time competing for those specific addresses even in a township with plenty of rooftops around them.
That's the part that's easy to miss if you're only counting what opened and what closed. The corridor didn't lose retail. It got rewired for a different kind of customer, one who doesn't have to live here to matter to the store's bottom line.
The Building That's Going Back to What It Was
The Sam Ash story adds a wrinkle to that pattern, because grocery-style retail is coming back to the corridor, just not to the same address.
Sam Ash Music closed its Edison store as part of more than 40 locations the chain shuttered nationwide, and the roughly 22,000-square-foot building sold for $5.5 million in 2024. Edison's Zoning Board gave final approval this past October for the site's new use: an Asian retail food market from a company called Asian Fresh of Edison, Inc. Yan Lin, a shareholder in the project, told the board that the building's history actually loops back on itself. Long before it was a music store, and before that a furniture shop, the site was a food market. Lin's plan is simply to
bring it back to the original purpose.
The approved plans call for renovating the outdated building, adding landscaping and a larger trash enclosure, and running the market with ten employees per shift from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. There's no announced opening date yet, so this is one to watch rather than one to plan around this fall. But it's worth noticing that the corridor's next grocery-style concept picked Route 27 near Plainfield Avenue instead of a Route 1 address, even though Route 1 sees far more daily traffic. That's consistent with the same logic driving everything else on this list: the format determines the address, not the other way around.
What This Actually Changes About Driving Route 1
None of this is dramatic enough to make the news twice, but it adds up to a real shift in what this stretch of road is for. Two years ago, Route 1 through this part of Edison had a pet supply store and two supermarkets doing double duty as neighborhood errands. Today it has a Western wear store, a fast-casual chicken chain with lines that form the night before, and an ice cream concept that made its New Jersey debut here. The supermarket space sits empty on two fronts, and the market that's supposed to fill part of that gap is being built a mile away on a different road entirely.
If you've noticed it's easier to grab dinner or hunt for a treat along this corridor than it used to be, and slightly less convenient to grab groceries without driving further than you used to, you're reading the corridor correctly. It isn't shrinking. It's just being used for a different job than it was two years ago.
If you're weighing a move to this part of Edison and want the kind of read on a street that goes beyond what's for sale on it, that's exactly the sort of local detail I like walking clients through before they ever look at a listing. Michelle Wasko has been tracking Central New Jersey neighborhoods like this one for years, corridor by corridor. Let's Connect.
