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

Stop & Shop

Opened: early 2000s

Owner: Ahold Delhaize

Previous Tenants: Hills Supermarket > Melmarkets Foodtown (demolished)

Cooperative: none

Location: 2525 Hempstead Tpk, East Meadow, NY

Photographed: August 6, 2024

One final Stop & Shop this weekend! Or if this is the first post you're reading, welcome, and there's a lot to see this weekend. This store is a very interesting store of about 63,000 square feet in East Meadow, on Long Island about 25 miles east of Times Square. This store was built around the 1970s as a Hills Supermarket attached to a department store next door, and it's possible they were actually connected inside. Some were set up that way, such as the former Two Guys in Morris Plains, NJ, later a ShopRite and now an Uncle Giuseppe's. It later became a Melmarkets Foodtown, which was either demolished and rebuilt or extensively renovated between 2000 and 2004.

Because of that history, the store's front wall is actually its side, and the front-end lines the Walmart store. You enter and look straight ahead for the checkouts, with the grand aisle to your left. For simplicity's sake, we're going to consider the wall that abuts the Walmart -- which is technically the right side of the store -- the front wall. So produce and the rest of the grand aisle line the left-side wall, with natural foods and deli in that area and cheese and seafood at the back. Meat and dairy line the back wall with frozen/dairy on the right side. Bakery, beer, and floral are in the front-right corner of the store. I'm not sure if there was previously a pharmacy here.

The store was most recently renovated around 2017 with a simple version of the wood-panel decor. This decor looks great in the stores that got more work or were new builds, but in some of the renovated locations it comes off as very bland.

Still, this is a fairly nice store if a bit drab.

It seemed busy when I visited in early August, before they had really started the closing process.

The current rumor going around social media is that Walmart hopes to expand into this space and turn their neighboring store into a Supercenter. The current store is around 120,000 square feet, a bit smaller than most Supercenters. Uncle Giuseppe's is also rumored to be interested in the space. They have a tiny location of under 8000 square feet -- I believe their original location -- diagonally across the street.

Service seafood department gone here, and it looks like the self-service case was beginning to thin out, too.

It's not an unattractive store but it's certainly not attractive either.

This had to have been a very low-budget remodel. The signage only looks slightly more than temporary.

But the store was definitely kept clean. Stop & Shop does seem to have improved their maintenance slightly in the last few months, but that's only a small step in the right direction.

Understated department signage here, to the point of being nearly invisible.

And it looks like the fixtures weren't replaced in the latest remodel, just painted. Still, they look alright.

Some signs of the store's closure show up in the seasonal department, which had all of its displays removed. If the store hasn't closed yet, it'll be closing by the end of the month.

HABA aisles still fully stocked at the time of my visit. This seemed to be generally the first department to go.

But some areas had clearly been cut back. Given my observations at the other locations, though, it's hard to tell whether this was in advance of the closure or just standard operating procedure.

I do wonder about instances like the signage below. Did some Stop & Shop executive really see that and think, yes, this is how we want our stores to look? I mean, it's not offensive, but it's almost impossible to see the extraordinarily bland department signage because of the location/angle and the lighting. Did nobody have eyes on things like this over the years?

I wonder if, like Hempstead, this remodel was a bit of a last-ditch effort to save the store. Still, it would've been a last-ditch effort seven years before its closure, which strikes me as strange.

There are quite a few more supermarkets in the immediate area. LIDL and Stew Leonard's are just west, Foodtown a little south of them, several to the east (Target, ShopRite, Walmart Neighborhood Market, and a recently-closed King Kullen), and a Key Food just north. For that reason, I doubt anyone other than Uncle Giuseppe's or Walmart is interested, assuming that Food Bazaar is out since it wasn't acquired with the other stores they did.

The bakery department looks better with a little bit more personality in the signage, different flooring, and different lighting, but it's still very bland.

Beer is even more so.

I do wonder if this beer department was originally a pharmacy, which I would expect to find in this spot. Beer is not typically in this location in stores of this era; it would be more normal to find it on the back wall (see Coram).

And floral is up next on the front wall. Remember that typically in this model of store, this corner would also have an entrance and exit, but since the store is set up rotated relative to the parking lot, this corner doesn't have anything.

Marty was still on the scene when I visited, too. Apparently the Marties from closing stores were boxed up and sent to other locations or a warehouse or something.

And a look at the front-end before we move along...

Next week we're back up in Worcester, but make sure you're all caught up on this weekend's posts! And assuming I have time, keep an eye out for my coverage of a few new stores this week too!

• Stop & Shop (closing) - Raynham, MA
• Stop & Shop (closing) - Sixteen Acres, Springfield, MA
• Wegmans (coming soon) - Lake Grove, NY
• Grocery Archaeology: Northeastern Worcester
• Food Bazaar Supermarket - Coney Island, Brooklyn
• Food Bazaar Supermarket - Hempstead, NY
• Food Bazaar Supermarket - Piscataway, NJ
• Stop & Shop (closing) - Coram, NY
• Stop & Shop (closing) - East Meadow, NY (this post)
• Tropical Supermarket - South Plainfield, NJ