Special Report: Stop & Shop (closing) - Hempstead, NY

Stop & Shop

Opened: 2001

Owner: Ahold Delhaize
Previous Tenants: none

Future Tenants: Food Bazaar (opening TBD)
Cooperative: none
Location: 132 Fulton Ave, Hempstead, NY
Photographed: August 6, 2024

Here's a bit of late-breaking news from around midday yesterday: in addition to Stop & Shop locations in Carlstadt, Piscataway, Mount Vernon, and Coney Island, Food Bazaar has acquired this location, in the middle of downtown Hempstead, NY, on Long Island. (It does look like there are some delays remaining with Mount Vernon, as the other four are now appearing on the Food Bazaar store locator on their website, but that one isn't. Oddly, only Coney Island and Mount Vernon are appearing on Food Bazaar's app.) Mount Vernon and Coney Island both closed yesterday at 3pm, and Coney Island reopened this morning as Food Bazaar. The dates for the rest of the conversions are as follows, according to Google Maps listings: Hempstead opens 10/4/24, Carlstadt opens 10/18/24, and Piscataway opens 11/1/24. If the schedule of one every two weeks holds, the Mount Vernon one would be expected to open on 9/20/24 but I haven't been able to confirm that. Then again, a local politician said in reference to this location that Food Bazaar is expected to begin operating here on 9/20, so maybe the timeline is still in flux. And both Stop & Shop and Food Bazaar have been remarkably bad at providing any clarity at all around the transitions. One intriguing note about this: it seems like Stop & Shop and Food Bazaar came to some agreement prior to the announcements, possibly even orchestrated by Stop & Shop. A line in this interview (around 7:05) talks about "finding someone to replace us" in five of the closing locations, which seems logically to be Food Bazaar. That makes me wonder if perhaps we could see more Stop & Shops becoming Food Bazaar (there already have been two in Brooklyn and Bridgeport).

So let's tour this Stop & Shop before it changes over! I visited the store in early August, after the closure had been announced but before the bulk of the actual closing work had been done. It's around 65,000 square feet and was built ground-up in 2001 as a Stop & Shop, it appears. Up until around 2020, it had its original Super Stop & Shop decor, but a remodel in 2020 or so brought this unfortunate decor package. As an interesting aside, Stop & Shop said the remodeled stores were performing better than non-remodeled stores, and this is the only one of the 32 closures that has been remodeled.

It's a pretty standard Super Stop & Shop layout, I would say, with the grand aisle on the left side. Customer service is immediately to your right when you enter, with bakery, deli, and prepared foods on the left side wall. Seafood, meat, and dairy line the back wall, with HABA, frozen, and the rest of dairy on the right side and a pharmacy in the front-right corner. Interestingly, it looks like in the 2020 remodel, Stop & Shop actually cut back the size of the store, closing off the last few aisles and moving the bakery from the front-right corner to the front-left corner.

Here's an overview of the grand aisle. It looks like most of these fixtures weren't replaced in the 2020 remodel, but they weren't all that old, so the store probably didn't need much work.

The bakery was moved from its usual location next to the pharmacy (see here for a layout comparison) to the front-left corner, bringing it next to the deli and into the grand aisle. While I don't know, my best guess is that this corner was originally floral or natural foods (or both).

On paper, this decor package looks great, I'm sure -- sleek, modern, and refined. In practice, many of these aging stores that got minimal renovation overall just look dingy, with their old floors, ceilings, and lighting left untouched in the remodels.

I suspect the deli-prepared foods department originally ended where the column is to the right above, or to the left of the "kitchen" sign below, and then the area that's now bakery prep was an alcove for, as I said, either natural foods or floral.

The store has been kept clean, but it felt outdated when I visited (although the closing process had already started, so it's not necessarily a fair assessment). This is one of four supermarkets in downtown Hempstead, with an ALDI, a Key Food, and a Bravo just east. None of them is a large-format, full-scale supermarket like this one, though. A mile and a half to the west, in West Hempstead, there are two full-scale supermarkets, another Stop & Shop (slightly larger and newer than this one) and a Cherry Valley Marketplace, a truly outstanding outpost of a local chain. It's smaller, occupying part of a former Pathmark, but a beautiful store with a fantastic perimeter and a more upscale shopping experience.

Notice the text behind the deli counter, which is left over from the previous decor package in this store. You can see how minimal the renovation work was decor-wise.

The cheese island is a nice feature, though, and I always like this setup from this era of Stop & Shop stores. The hanging blue lights are left over from before the renovation.

It looks like the store opened with a service seafood counter, then it was removed at some point, and installed once again in the 2020 remodel. Here we're looking across the back wall of the store. I assume Food Bazaar will probably invest a lot of money into renovating this store, since the renovation four years ago didn't really do much. I also wonder if they will expand to the full size of the building. In North Bergen, the Food Basics they acquired almost ten years ago was also smaller in size than the full building, and they expanded the supermarket to fill the whole building. Apologies for the terrible formatting on the North Bergen post, as you can see, that was quite a few years ago.

The biggest issue with this decor package is that the stores feel so plain and lifeless. In this case, the store was in fact lifeless because it was a month away from closing.

Food Bazaar will likely replace the grocery shelving here, but they don't even have to -- it looks like this shelving might've been put in in 2020.

The kitchenwares department was definitely already winding down, though, at the time of my visit.

In the picture below, you can see where a wall was constructed to shrink the sales floor. It doesn't quite go all the way up to the ceiling, although I'm not sure why.

Other areas were obviously also clearing out, such as this area where sales pallets would normally be placed.

Dairy in the back-right corner, with the store ending a little sooner than it used to.

HABA was similarly beginning to clear out. In all of these closing stores, Stop & Shop doesn't seem to be doing any form of liquidation sales or really any markdowns at all. In fact, some of the prices are higher than normal because the closing stores stopped running a circular, meaning that everything has been full-priced for a little while.

A look back over towards the grand aisle.

The freezer cases were painted in the renovation, but it doesn't look like they were replaced. I'm gonna bet that the wet floor signage is probably due to them leaking. I assume that type of functional change will be done quickly by Food Bazaar.

Dairy and frozen in the last aisle, which is aisle 17. This area used to be HABA, and as is typical in these Super Stop & Shops, there was a large nonfoods section.

And you can see how the dividing wall just sliced off part of the store. My best guess is, if that section was used at all, it was simply used for storage. It wasn't sublet. In a way, that makes me wonder if the 2020 remodel was a last-ditch effort to save a failing store. I doubt this was planned as a sustainable long-term solution (if it were, wouldn't the wall at least have been built to fully close off that section of the store)?

The pharmacy probably didn't move in the remodel, it's just that the bakery and several more aisles (including frozen and dairy) were beyond the dividing wall here.

But Stop & Shop doesn't seem to have tried too hard to better use the space. This big open space, which I assume might have been sale displays at one time, is in front of a closed entrance and exit door. I assume, too, that that entrance and exit were closed during the remodel.

Here's a look across the front-end. Nice clean shiny floor, at least.

And looking in the other direction.

It'll be very interesting to see what Food Bazaar does with this location, along with all the others! This brings us to six of the 32 stores that already have new tenants (Food Bazaar's five plus Uncle Giuseppe's acquiring the Greenvale location on Long Island). I will be back someday, although since I live in New Jersey, Long Island is not the most convenient for me to visit. Still, stay tuned, and check here for all my coverage of the 2024 closures!