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 closed Long Island locations are located in Greenvale, at 130 Wheatley Plaza; Coram, at 294 Middle Country Road; Hempstead, at 132 Fulton Street; and East Meadow, at 2525 Hempstead Tpke.
The 32 closed stores, in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island, will close on or before November, the Quincy, Massachusetts-based retailer said on Nov. 2.
“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 foundation for future growth for our brand,” said Gordon Reed, president of Stop & Shop.
Stop & Shop said no employees will be laid off because of the store closing.
“They will be given opportunities to move to other nearby stores,” said Daniel Wolk, a Stop & Shop spokesman.
Local unions said they are working to ensure Stop & Shop keeps its promise that workers will not lose their jobs.
“These are the same people who helped them get through the pandemic, and we want to make sure they are still treated as essential. That’s first and foremost. The thing we’ve learned from COVID is how important these jobs are,” said Ali Waddy, treasurer of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union in Westbury.
Stop & Shop declined to say how many employees are working in the closed stores. But local unions, which represent all store employees except managers, have offered some insight.
The local union represents a total of about 420 workers at the four closed Long Island stores.
- UFCW Local 1500 represents 258 employees who work as cashiers and stock clerks, as well as in the produce, dairy, frozen, bakery, bookkeeping, price integrity and maintenance departments at Stop & Shop stores in Coram, Greenville and Hempstead, Wadi said.
- About 100 people work in those roles, as well as in the prepared foods department, at the East Meadow store, represented by the Retail and Department Store Union/UFCW Local 338 in Mineola, said Nikki Katman, director of policy and communications.
- UFCW Local 342 also represents about 60 meat, seafood and deli workers at the Coram, Greenvale and Hempstead stores, and just meat and seafood workers at the East Meadow Island store, said Kelly Lambo, Staten’s director of local activities and communications.
The 32 store closures will leave Stop & Shop with 359 supermarkets in five states: 81 in Connecticut, 115 in Massachusetts, 47 in New Jersey, 91 in New York and 25 in Rhode Island.
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Stop & Shop, owned by Dutch company Ahold Delhaize, is the largest grocery store on Long Island.
Its 50 stores on the island represent 31.6 percent of the market share, according to Food Trade News, a Columbia, Maryland-based publication.
Stop & Shop, which dominated New England, came to the metropolitan area in the mid-1990s by acquiring several regional chains, said Jeff Metzger, publisher of Food Trade News.
Stop & Shop is a traditional supermarket retailer that is being challenged by increasing competition from specialty and discount grocers, he said.
On Long Island, that includes upscale grocery store 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 plans to open five more local stores by 2025.
Another German discounter, Lidl, which now has 24 stores on Long Island, entered the local market in 2019, when the U.S. retailer finalized its purchase of Bethpage-based Best Market, which has 27 stores in New Jersey and New York, including all 24 on the island.
“So, there’s a lot [grocery] There’s less shopper loyalty and more cross-shopping,” said Metzger, who also said Stop & Shop has been too slow to update its stores.
None of the four Long Island communities that lost Stop & Shop stores were classified 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.
Some loyal residents will miss the Stop & Shop in Hempstead, a nearly 50,000-square-foot supermarket in The Hub shopping center, but the village is “far from being a food desert,” Mayor Waylyn Hobbs Jr. said.
In recent years, Aldi has opened on Peninsula Boulevard and a CTown supermarket has opened on South Franklin Street, Hobbs said, adding that the Compar Foods store will be part of a new retail development being built on Main Street.
“Even with that many supermarkets, there is still enough of a customer base to sustain these markets here in Hempstead Village. I just think … the size of Stop & Shop … they couldn’t sustain their business,” Hobbs said.
Regular shoppers at the 66,194-square-foot store in Coram “will miss out on some of the convenience of having it in their own community, but there is [other] “The stores to the west and east within five or 10 minutes they will be able to shop there,” said Brookhaven City Councilman Michael Logercio, 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 its store portfolio. As of May, more than half of the stores had been remodeled, “and those stores are performing well,” Frans Muller, Ahold’s president and CEO, told analysts during an earnings call on May 8.
“We want to grow our market share similarly through Stop & Shop. We have a number of strategies there. Private label is one, price competitiveness and loyalty offers are in the mix.”
