It was a Tuesday in early October at the Cowtown Farmers Market, and everything from blue jeans and underwear to samurai swords and stun guns were for sale under the long brick-colored barn off Route 40 in Salem County, New Jersey.

“You’ll notice it’s not very busy,” Grant Harris, the fourth-generation owner of the century-old flea market and rodeo, said. “Tuesdays are really suffering.”

Cowtown is only open on Tuesday and Saturday, and in the past, the former was the busier of the two days. Now it’s slower, in part because Cowtown is competing with the likes of Walmart, Amazon, and Dollar General. “Super discounted merchandise used to only be accessible in a market like this,” he said. “Now there’s a lot of competition.”

Harris has watched this evolution firsthand, with a number of those big-name competitors setting up shop just down the road. All along the New Jersey section of Route 40, which extends from Atlantic City all the way to Silver Summit, Utah, millions of square feet of warehouse space are under construction, transforming this once-sleepy corner of rural South Jersey into a logistics hub for the biggest retailers in the US.

Keep reading here.—AV

Driving down the backroads of Salem County, Dean Sparks listed off land sales like a one-man Zillow page. The farmer and deputy mayor of Oldmans Township has been keeping close tabs on who sells their land and who doesn’t in this little pocket of South Jersey.

“This was bought for $30,000 an acre,” he said, pointing toward a seemingly anonymous plot of farmland. “I know the guys that owned it, and that was considered big money at the time, but now, I mean they’re just throwing around crazy numbers.”

Sparks was referring to the deep-pocketed warehouse developers that in the last several years have helped transform Salem County into a logistics hub, standing up 5.1 million square feet of warehouse space for retailers, such as Amazon, since 2020.

But not every landowner has jumped at the opportunity.

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In Salem County, New Jersey, way down at the southern tip of the state, 5.1 million square feet of warehouse space has gone up since 2020, according to CoStar data. The boom has transformed the largely rural South Jersey county into one of the hottest logistics hubs in the state, and with another 2.1 million square feet under construction, and an additional 5.3 million proposed, it doesn’t look like the building spree is ending anytime soon.

On the ground, however, there is a sense that even amid this gold rush, warehouse development is about to hit a wall in Salem County.

Keep reading here.—AV