Walmart Neighborhood Market on Long Island gets revamp as retailer upgrades small grocery stores
The remodeled Walmart Neighborhood Market in Levittown on Thursday. Credit: Rick Kopstein
The only Walmart Neighborhood Market on Long Island — and in New York State — just got some upgrades, as the world’s largest retailer puts more focus on its small grocery stores.
The market in Levittown recently has undergone changes that included expanding the deli to make it a full-service department with a hot bar; increasing the selection of refrigerated ready-to-go foods; widening and elongating the aisles to add more grocery items; switching some of the self-checkout lanes to registers with cashiers; and adding new paint, fixtures and signs, the retailer said.
The 49,395-square-foot grocery store also added a pharmacy consulting room for private conversations with customers and tripled the size of an area where employees fulfill digital orders for customer deliveries and pickups, said Dwyne Batin, store manager.
Some of the changes, such as the expanded deli, were in response to customer requests, he said.
WHAT NEWSDAY FOUND
- A Walmart Neighborhood Market in Levittown — the only one in New York State — was recently upgraded to include an expanded deli, wider selection of refrigerated ready-to-go foods and other features.
- Neighborhood markets are grocery stores that are significantly smaller than Walmart’s discount stores and supercenters.
- The Levittown store is among 150 neighborhood markets that Walmart will be remodeling, the retailer said.
“The customer demand is high. I think adding it to this type of format really just brings more customers here and just … [provides] more options for the customers to eat,” he said.
Located at 3335 Hempstead Tpke., the Levittown store opened in 2013.
The remodeling work began in March and was completed about a month ago, said Batin, who added that a grand reopening ceremony would take place Friday, but the store didn’t close while the work took place.
Bentonville, Arkansas-based Walmart Inc. declined to disclose the cost of the work.
In 1998, the discounter launched its neighborhood markets, which are grocery stores and are significantly smaller than Walmart’s discount stores and supercenters. The smaller size gives Walmart the ability to open stores in more-urban communities and other areas with limited real estate availability.
Walmart’s neighborhood markets average 42,000 square feet in size, while its discount stores, which include some groceries, average 105,000 square feet and its supercenters, which include grocery stores, average 178,000 square feet, according to the retailer’s 2024 annual report, released in April.
'Value, speed and convenience'
The Levittown store is among 150 neighborhood markets that Walmart, in a plan announced in 2024, will be remodeling, opening as completely new stores or converting from its existing discount stores over a five-year period. Wider aisles, more fresh food selections, and more space for pickup and delivery orders are part of the plan, the retailer said.
In May, Walmart announced that two larger neighborhood markets, at 57,000 square feet — in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, and Atlanta — had opened under the new initiative.
“The expanded space will allow us to sharpen our focus on value, speed and convenience,” Kyle Kinnard, senior vice president of Walmart Neighborhood Markets, wrote in a blog post in May.
Walmart has 3,559 supercenters, 355 discount stores, 671 neighborhood markets and 600 Sam's Clubs.
The Levittown store is a high-performing location for Walmart, bringing in the highest-volume sales among the neighborhood markets on the East Coast, Batin said.
That is likely due in part to its close proximity to Queens, since New York City has no Walmart stores.
Shifting shopping habits
Among Walmart Inc.’s 14 stores on Long Island, there is one Sam’s Club in Medford and three supercenters — in Farmingdale, Valley Stream and Yaphank.
Walmart is the largest grocer nationwide but not on Long Island, where Stop & Shop ranks first.
Among all stores that sell food on Long Island, including drugstores and warehouse clubs, Stop & Shop had 18.2% of the market share as of March, down from 20.08% in 2021, according to a June report from Food Trade News, a Columbia, Maryland-based publication.
Quincy, Massachusetts-headquartered Stop & Shop has 46 stores on Long Island, after closing four stores last year.
But Walmart’s market share on Long Island is growing — from 4.69% in 2021 to 5.59% last year — as discounters and specialty retailers attract more shoppers.
Nationwide, retail grocery spending grew about 2% last year, but Walmart’s grew at about 4%, said Noah Rohr, consumer equity research analyst at Morningstar Research Services LLC, a financial services firm in Chicago.
Because of its value-focused prices and large grocery business, Walmart is more insulated than its competitors from consumers pulling back on discretionary spending, while demand remains high for household essentials and groceries, he said.
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.
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