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Open for Business: Health and Beauty, 139 Fifth Avenue
Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 1:58PM 
After many vacant years, the corner store on Fifth and St. Johns is back in business. Health and Beauty, a vitamin/natural products store from the same owners as the Fifth Avenue Market a couple blocks away, opened this morning, and it's actually quite impressive.
It's a spotless, wall-laid out space that at first glance may appear to be just another bodega, but it's anything but. An entire wall is lined with vitamins and other supplements, and care has been taken to make sure that every item for sale (except for some candy) is natural and organic, down to the shampoo and drinking straws.
Consider it a bodega for the health- and environment-conscious: All the snacks and sodas are natural, and all the non-edible items are green and eco-friendly, even the trash bads and drinking cups. There are also a few surprises, like Van Leeuwen Ice Cream alongside hard-to-find probiotic supplements.
Open For Business in Storefronts
Reader Comments (6)
No one knows better how to take a few extra dollars from Slopers looking to spend $5, rather than $3, on random bodega fare than the 5th Avenue Market folks. Y'all have fun draining that disposable income there.
Looks like a great addition, that 5th Avenue market is fantastic. Great selection, super clean and open 24 hours. What more could one want? Oh, well if you're Mick above, I guess you want everything for free, but other than that, nothing to complain about from me on this one. That corner was a burned out eyesore for years and now it's a great store that people will use.
5th Avenue Market is extremely clean and does a good sandwich when you need it. The owners (and those nice, smiling, agreeable guys behind the counter aren't just employees, as they'll tell you. they are businessmen to the core who know exactly what they're doing) know they're selling you the same kind of products you'd buy anywhere else, but only carry supposed "premium" brands which you're paying double the price for. It's an admirable, brilliant, strategy, and folks like foodie eat it up.
I do a lot of comparison shopping and can ASSURE you the prices are not double. There is always a small premium in price in a small business which can't buy things in bulk quantities like Walmart or Duane Reade. And of course they are businessmen, did you think this was a charity?
I have no problem paying 5-10% more at a local business, especially one that is open 24 hours 7 days a week serving the community day and night with a smile. These kinds of places are nice to go grab a snack at an off hour, grab a sandwich as you say or get some food when you're drunk and walkin by, it's not a place to do your weekly grocery shopping.
I always buy my $10 goat milk ice cream, bacon chocolate bars, and falafel chips at Duane Reade and at the Park Slope Walmart......wait, what?
I can't believe anyone would complain about the Fifth Avenue Market. In 16 years of living all over New York, it is by far the best corner grocery I've ever seen in the boroughs. Prices are always a little higher than at a grocery store - a corner store is for convenience, not bargain shopping. And the sandwich I always get there - hot grilled chicken and cheese on a big hero - is 6 bucks. That's a markup? This place never closes - it was even open for every minute of the 20 inch snowstorn last year.
"are businessmen to the core who know exactly what they're doing)"
Um...boo?