King Kullen supermarket in Selden to close in September

The King Kullen supermarket in Selden is closing next month after nearly 25 years in business.

The Selden store, which opened in 1992, will shut on Sept. 1 because it was an underperforming store, King Kullen officials said. The lease for the supermarket, on Middle Country Road/Route 25 and Boyle Road, doesn’t expire until next year.

The Selden store is across the street from a ShopRite that opened in October 2012. A Best Market store that opened in February is located about a mile and a half away at a former Waldbaum’s supermarket on Middle Country Road.

“Closing an underperforming store is a difficult decision, but it allows us to focus our resources on the other King Kullen locations,” Brian Cullen, co-president of family-owned and -run King Kullen, said in a statement Monday. “Because of this strategy we are stronger than we’ve been in years and making capital improvements throughout the chain. We’ve been here for 86 years and look forward to serving Long Island for many years to come.”

The closest King Kullen stores to Selden are in Middle Island, Lake Ronkonkoma and Mount Sinai. The 19 full-time and 53 part-time employees at the Selden store are being offered employment in other King Kullen stores.

“They are not laying anybody off,” said Tony Speelman, president of United Food and Commercial Workers International Union’s Local 1500, based in Westbury. “They are going to offer transfers. Hopefully, most people will take it.”

King Kullen is installing LED lighting in all its stores, expanding its home delivery and pickup services, upgrading its Bay Shore store, installing credit card chip readers, and expanding offerings of meals-to-go, a King Kullen spokesman said.

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After the Selden closing, Bethpage-based King Kullen will have 34 of its namesake stores on Long Island and five Wild by Nature stores, the company’s high-end grocers. King Kullen’s store in Northport closed in February and its East Setauket store closed in June 2015. It opened a store at a former Waldbaum’s in North Patchogue in December 2015.

King Kullen is expected to close its Commack store at 120 Veterans Memorial Hwy. once its lease expires in September 2017. Whole Foods Market will be taking over a portion of the 60,000-square-foot space and plans to open in 2019, that company announced in May.