Stop & Shop closing 4 Long Island 'underperforming' supermarkets

Stop & Shop will close 32 “underperforming” supermarkets, including four on Long Island, by early November, but the grocer says no workers will be laid off. 

The closing Long Island locations are in Greenvale, at 130 Wheatley Plaza; Coram, at 294 Middle Country Rd.; Hempstead, at 132 Fulton Ave.; and East Meadow, at 2525 Hempstead Tpke.

The 32 closing stores, which are in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island, will be shuttered on or before Nov. 2, the Quincy, Massachusetts-based retailer said.

“As we announced in May, Stop & Shop has evaluated its overall store portfolio and made the difficult decision to close underperforming stores to create a healthy base for the future growth of our brand," Gordon Reid, president of Stop & Shop, said in a statement.

No employees will be laid off due to the store closings, Stop & Shop said.

“They will be given opportunities to transfer to other nearby stores,” said Daniel Wolk, spokesman for Stop & Shop.

Local unions said they are working to ensure that Stop & Shop keeps its promise that workers will not lose their jobs.

“These are the same people that got them through the pandemic, and we want to make sure that they’re still treated as essential. That’s first and foremost. The thing that we learned from COVID is how important these jobs are,” said Aly Y. Waddy, secretary-treasurer of United Food and Commercial Workers International Union in Westbury.

Stop & Shop declined to say how many employees work at the closing stores. But the union locals, which represent all store employees except managers, provided some insights.

The union locals represent a total of about 420 workers in the four closing Long Island stores. 

• UFCW Local 1500 represents 258 employees working as cashiers and stock clerks, as well as in produce, dairy, frozen, bakery, bookkeeping, price integrity and maintenance departments at the Stop & Shop stores in Coram, Greenvale and Hempstead, Waddy said.
• About 100 people working in those roles, as well as in the deli department, in the East Meadow store are represented by the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union/UFCW Local 338 in Mineola, said Nikki Kateman, political and communications director.
• Also, UFCW Local 342 represents about 60 workers in meat, seafood and deli at the Coram, Greenvale and Hempstead stores, and just meat and seafood workers at the East Meadow store, said Keeley Lampo, director of activities and communications for the local on Staten Island. 

The 32 store closings will leave Stop & Shop with 359 supermarkets in five states: 81 stores in Connecticut, 115 in Massachusetts, 47 in New Jersey, 91 in New York and 25 in Rhode Island.

More choice

Owned by Dutch company Ahold Delhaize, Stop & Shop is the largest grocer on Long Island. 

Its 50 stores on the Island account for 31.6% of the market share, according to Food Trade News, a Columbia, Maryland-based publication.

Dominant in New England, Stop & Shop came to the metropolitan area in the mid-90s with the acquisition of several regional chains, said Jeff Metzger, publisher of Food Trade News.

But Stop & Shop is a traditional supermarket retailer that is being challenged by growing competition from discount and specialty grocers, he said.

On Long Island, that has included high-end grocer Whole Foods Market, which has six stores, three of which have opened since 2019. Whole Foods plans to open a store in Huntington Station on Wednesday and one in Holbrook in 2025.

German discount grocer Aldi has 13 stores on Long Island, including four that opened in the past two years, and it plans to open five more local stores by 2025.

Another German discounter, Lidl, which now has 24 Long Island stores, entered the local market in 2019, when the retailer’s U.S. arm finalized its purchase from Bethpage-based Best Market of 27 New Jersey and New York stores, including all 24 on the Island.

“So, there’s a lot more [grocery] choice and there is a lot more overstoring in general. And there is a lot less shopper loyalty and more cross shopping,” said Metzger, who also said Stop & Shop has been too slow in updating its stores.

None of the four Long Island communities losing Stop & Shop stores is designated as having limited access to healthy food in grocery stores, or what used to be called "food deserts," according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The Stop & Shop in Hempstead, which is an approximately 50,000-square-foot supermarket in The Hub Shopping Center, will be missed by some loyal residents, but the village “is far from being a food desert,” Mayor Waylyn Hobbs Jr. said.

In recent years, an Aldi has opened on Peninsula Boulevard and a CTown Supermarket has opened on South Franklin Street, said Hobbs, adding that a Compare Foods will be part of a new retail development being built on Main Street.

“Even with this many supermarkets, there is still enough customer base to sustain these markets here in the village of Hempstead. I just think … the size of that Stop & Shop … they weren’t able to sustain their business,” Hobbs said.

Regular shoppers at the 66,194-square-foot store in Coram “will lose some of the convenience of having it right in their own community, but there are [other] stores to the west and to the east within 5 or 10 minutes that they’ll be able to shop at,” said Brookhaven Councilman Michael Loguercio, who represents District 4.

Dissatisfied with Stop & Shop’s performance, Ahold has been working on an improvement plan that includes remodeling stores and right-sizing the store portfolio. As of May, more than half the stores had been remodeled, “and those stores are performing well,” Frans Muller, Ahold’s president and chief executive officer, told analysts during an earnings call May 8.

“We would like to grow our market shares like-for-like with Stop & Shop. And we have a number of strategies there. And private label is one and price competitiveness and loyalty promotions in the mix,” he said.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.