Stop & Shop closures

[BillyGr]

We were just in Provincetown and went into the captive S&S...quite dire----it's a joke in town, but it and CVS is all that is there. It felt like they had invested nothing in the store after they took it over from A&P except for self check outs and the scanner guns you could check out. We always stop at the Market Basket at the beginning of the Cape...that's a pretty joyous store (only let down by a scarcity of public bathrooms when they''re quite needed...they clearly built their normal footprint and the store could use a doubling of the bathrooms)

It is possible even the self checkouts are from A&P... they did have some of those.

The one A&P I know of from MA (more around West Springfield/Westfield) had the long, belted self-checkouts where the items go through and it senses if it is what you scanned. I think Big Y bought that location and probably removed them, but that might be a clue if the ones in this store are A&P era or not.

[buckguy]

We were just in Provincetown and went into the captive S&S...quite dire----it's a joke in town, but it and CVS is all that is there. It felt like they had invested nothing in the store after they took it over from A&P except for self check outs and the scanner guns you could check out. We always stop at the Market Basket at the beginning of the Cape...that's a pretty joyous store (only let down by a scarcity of public bathrooms when they''re quite needed...they clearly built their normal footprint and the store could use a doubling of the bathrooms)

I was in the Provincetown store about 10 years ago--what made it memorable was the lack of any real decor and a rather odd layout--I don't remember many of the specifics but there large dairy cases across from one of the usual perimeter department rather than it being its own department and I forget how the aisles were laid out, perhaps they were lengthwise, so that this made more sense. It seemed bigger than the 13K sf stores A&P put in urban neighborhoods and small towns during the 50s to early 70s. Maybe it was based on their 19K prototype which was common in the Centennial era. Some time before, I'd been to the last DC A&P (actually a Super Fresh) which had been slightly built out, but was one of these 13K stores and Provincetown was not as claustrophobic.

[rwsandiego]

This piece of clickb, er, "journalism." caught my eye. While not completely inaccurate, if Stop and Shop were so popular they would not be closing stores!

[marketreportblog]

So I've been visiting a lot of the closing Stop & Shop stores when I can, and most recently got to go to some of the locations on Long Island and in CT and MA. They're well on their way to closure -- a few had already closed service departments and all had started clearing out the shelves (although none yet have any form of clearance discounts, everything is still full-priced and they're running the regular circular). One store had even closed a few aisles, with cases of bottled water blocking them off. Seeing that, I doubt most of the stores will make it all the way to early November, the deadline for closing.

Three stores already have new tenants lined up. In Greenvale, NY, on Long Island, a roughly 50,000 square foot acquired Pathmark is slated to become the latest Uncle Giuseppe's, a fast-growing Long Island-based upscale Italian supermarket chain. In southern Brooklyn, a slightly smaller former Pathmark between Gravesend and Coney Island will be acquired by Food Bazaar. And just a couple blocks outside New York City to the north, the Mount Vernon, NY Stop & Shop (built ca. 2005 on the site of a former ShopRite) will also become a Food Bazaar, joining their other Mount Vernon location about a mile northwest. At 80,000 square feet, the Mount Vernon location is one of the larger Stop & Shops and will become the second-largest Food Bazaar. According to a local politician's Facebook post, the Coney Island Stop & Shop is set to close at 10pm on September 19th and reopen the following morning as a Food Bazaar, but no word on the timeline for the other two. Food Bazaar acquired a Stop & Shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn in January 2023, also with an overnight transition, and earlier this month, re-opened an acquired Stop & Shop in Bridgeport, CT. (That store closed for renovation from February to August.)

I don't have any other intel on replacements for other locations. Many aren't even advertised as available yet, which makes those three replacements a bit surprising. I do still think the majority of the stores won't stay supermarkets, but a few other random locations might see replacements like SuperFresh or Grocery Outlet (in part of the space).

[pseudo3d]

Stop & Shop is going to stop selling tobacco products.

https://www.supermarketnews.com/nonfood ... o-products

Curious--the only places I've heard to do this (apart from Wegmans, which was never big on HBA anyway) are the ones that farmed out their pharmacy operations to CVS.

[BillyGr]

So I've been visiting a lot of the closing Stop & Shop stores when I can, and most recently got to go to some of the locations on Long Island and in CT and MA. They're well on their way to closure -- a few had already closed service departments and all had started clearing out the shelves (although none yet have any form of clearance discounts, everything is still full-priced and they're running the regular circular). One store had even closed a few aisles, with cases of bottled water blocking them off. Seeing that, I doubt most of the stores will make it all the way to early November, the deadline for closing.

Happened to be at one of the Edison (NJ) locations on the 10th and nothing was noticeable at that point there. Though I think when I went to look at an ad later on (last week), it said something to the effect that they were not doing pickup there (as it was still set for that store), so they may have started making changes sometime after that.

[marketreportblog]

5 of the 32 locations now have replacement tenants:

• Uncle Giuseppe's: Greenvale, NY

• Food Bazaar: Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY; Mount Vernon, NY; Carlstadt, NJ; Piscataway, NJ

Greenvale to Uncle G and the Brooklyn and Mt Vernon stores to FB just makes total sense and those are all but guaranteed successes. Carlstadt and Piscataway to Food Bazaar... those are definitely swings, let's see if they're hits. Food Bazaar has built their business on urban, ethnically diverse neighborhoods in and immediately around New York City; Carlstadt and Piscataway definitely have some ethnic diversity but neither is in any way urban. Both have large ShopRites nearby (and the store nearest the Piscataway location is brand-new) and are very suburban areas, meaning people are willing to drive for food shopping. Carlstadt is close to Passaic and Piscataway to Plainfield, the areas where I would assume Food Bazaar will draw customers from, but they may be able to pull it off by catering to a lot of different groups in one location. They're actually quite good at that. Food Bazaar has also acquired two other Stop & Shops in the past. One is in Flatbush, Brooklyn and the other is in Bridgeport, CT which opened a few weeks ago.

It doesn't surprise me that Food Bazaar continues to expand, and grabbing these closing big-chain stores is the way they've done a lot of their expansion. In 2007, they had 12 stores (9 Food Bazaars and 3 Food Dimensions). Today, they're up to 33 (plus these four and at least two others on the way makes 39). And while I'm not sure about the first 20 years of their business, from 2007 to the present, they didn't close a single store, which to me says they're doing something right. I'm cautiously optimistic because these neighborhoods are very different from what they're used to but they've proven flexible.

No word yet on the other locations, except for the perennial rumors about kosher supermarkets being interested in West Haverstraw, Jackson, and Howell (all are near Orthodox Jewish communities). I'm expecting many of the others won't stay supermarkets.

[storewanderer]

It seems like these replacements will need to do significant hiring in order to get these stores operating up to their standards.

Are they keeping the union?

[marketreportblog]

It seems like these replacements will need to do significant hiring in order to get these stores operating up to their standards.

Are they keeping the union?

Absolutely right -- both Uncle G and Food Bazaar run significantly higher-labor operations than S&S. In a Stop & Shop, it doesn't surprise me to see two or three cashiers, but in a Food Bazaar, you're more likely to see two or three head cashiers/supervisors and a dozen cashiers. Uncle G probably employs as many people in their deli and prepared foods departments as Stop & Shop does in the full store, in the location they're taking over.

Both Uncle G and Food Bazaar are union, typically represented by the same local as the Stop & Shops in the places they overlap. Staffing is going to be tricky, though, because my guess is, with the exception of the Cropsey Ave/Coney Island store, they're probably gonna be closed for renovations for a while. And in the meantime, I think it's likely that many of the current S&S employees will transfer to different S&S stores. But Uncle G and Food Bazaar never seem to have trouble hiring -- they're almost always very fully staffed when I visit.

[Alpha8472]

Stop & Shop is going to stop selling tobacco products.

https://www.supermarketnews.com/nonfood ... o-products

Curious--the only places I've heard to do this (apart from Wegmans, which was never big on HBA anyway) are the ones that farmed out their pharmacy operations to CVS.

This has several reasons. CVS insurance charges different reimbursement rates to pharmacies if the store sells tobacco. A pharmacy or pharmacy in a store that sells tobacco would be paid less money for each prescription from the insurance. It would be to Stop & Shop's advantage to stop selling tobacco so that each prescription sale would be more profitable.

CVS committed to stop selling tobacco in its stores and pharmacies in 2014.

Tobacco sales require a ton of labor. Employees have to check for expiration dates and often many of these products sit on the shelves and expire. Some brands don't sell well.

Store chains that are notorious for understaffing don't want to have an employee spending hours on checking for expired products, restocking, looking out for theft, unlocking tobacco cabinets, etc. Walmart stopped selling tobacco for this reason. Some Walgreens stores also stopped tobacco sales.

Walgreens had a ton of tobacco theft. It made sense to simply stop selling tobacco in some stores since people just walk right in and brazenly steal everything. They stopped selling e-cigarettes along with Rite Aid and Kroger.