Burlington plans 6 more stores for Long Island as retailer eyes smaller spaces

Burlington's plan to improve sales by more than doubling its number of stores, using some smaller spaces, includes six more stores on Long Island.

Burlington Stores Inc., which already has eight stores on Long Island, plans to open half a dozen more — in Huntington, New Hyde Park, Oceanside, Riverhead, Selden and West Babylon.

“Burlington … continues to expand across the country, offering millions of customers amazing bargains on top brands and the chance to find something new every time they shop,” said spokeswoman Annie Holmes, who added that about 65 employees will be hired for each of the new Long Island stores.

The Huntington store will open Nov. 3; New Hyde Park, Nov. 10; and West Babylon, Nov. 17, according to Burlington’s website.

The Burlington, New Jersey-based retailer declined to disclose opening information for the other three stores.

The retailer has 939 stores nationwide, including 91 that opened in its fiscal 2022 year, which ended Jan. 28, 2023.

The chain is projecting that it will add 70 to 80 net new stores in the current fiscal year.

For the past few years, Burlington has been working to improve sales and cut operating costs by opening smaller stores. In 2020, the chain announced a plan to have 2,000 stores, and a smaller-store prototype is part of the equation.

The average size of the company’s new stores fell from 45,000 square feet in 2017 to 28,000 square feet last year, the retailer said in its 2022 annual report.

Burlington took advantage of the April bankruptcy filing of Bed Bath & Beyond to scoop up some vacant spaces. The off-price retailer acquired more than 60 Bed Bath & Beyond leases this year, including four of the six additional stores planned for Long Island.

"I'm glad to say that the supply of great real estate locations has opened up significantly over the last several months, driven especially by the winding down of Bed Bath & Beyond. … We would typically wait until the store locations revert back to the landlord. The benefit of acquiring leases directly is that we get to cherry-pick the locations that we're most interested in," Burlington CEO Michael O’Sullivan told analysts during an earnings call in August.

The retailer’s store planned for Oceanside will be 37,236 square feet, while the Riverhead store will occupy 30,031 square feet and West Babylon, 29,575 square feet. All three are former Bed Bath & Beyond stores whose leases Burlington acquired in the home goods retailer’s bankruptcy over the summer.

The New Hyde Park space also was formerly occupied by Bed Bath & Beyond, but Burlington signed a lease for that 31,000-square-foot space shortly before the bankruptcy filing, Robert Peck, managing agent and partner in Lake Success Shopping Center LLC, told Newsday in August.

Burlington’s 25,442-square-foot Huntington store will take over a space vacated by off-price retailer Marshalls, which relocated to a different unit in Huntington Commons in October.

In Selden, a 20,660-square-foot Burlington will replace a Bob’s Stores, a dry cleaner and a mobile phone store.

Burlington’s total sales in its fiscal second quarter were $2.17 billion, a 9% increase from the same period a year earlier.

Burlington is performing well but it lags behind its off-price competitors, such as TJ Maxx and Ross, Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at Manhattan-based market research firm GlobalData, wrote in a note about Burlington’s earnings in August.

“This is perhaps a function of the profile of Burlington shoppers, who tend to be more concentrated at the lower end of the income spectrum and so are feeling the pinch of the cost-of-living crisis far more,” he wrote.