Save-A-Lot store leaving Buffalo’s Broadway Market

Save-A-Lot will close its Broadway Market location next week, leaving Tops Markets and Aldi as the only traditional supermarkets serving the giant neighborhood.

The closure of Save-A-Lot is a blow to the area, coming shortly after six Family Dollar stores closed in the community, leaving residents with few places to purchase groceries and household items such as cleaning products and medicines at affordable prices.

The closure will also be a loss to the Broadway market, tenants said. The bustling, low-cost supermarket has attracted foot traffic that will soon be absent from the public market, meaning other tenants and vendors will soon have a smaller audience of customers to sell to outside of the peak Easter season.

Another Save-A-Lot franchisee, Upstate Supermarket, hoped to take over the Save-A-Lot store for the cost of its inventory, but failed to reach an agreement on lease terms with the Broadway Market.

Ron Horrigan, the owner of Broadway Market Save-A-Lot, said he has been losing money at the location for years.

“Everything went downhill after we were looted,” he said, referring to incidents of looting at the store during the 2022 Christmas snowstorm.

The store’s insurance had a $5,000 deductible and did not include cleaning and restocking costs, he said. Earlier this year, foot traffic had fallen to about half of what it had been, and the problems were exacerbated by the end of Covid-19-era food benefits, which had increased average SNAP benefits by About $200 per family, he said.

The store has also seen an increase in shoplifting, which is already worse than other Horrigan stores in Chaffee, Cheektowaga and North Collins, he said. At the same time, the minimum wage has increased, thereby increasing the cost of labor. The cost of suppliers delivering food to his store has increased by $21,000, he said. He is six months late in paying his rent.

Horrigan met with Mayor Byron Brown to ask for financial assistance, but said his sales were too high to qualify for grocery subsidies previously offered by the city. He is scheduled to meet with city officials again Wednesday, but said it’s probably too late to save his store.

“The town, they all cry when someone leaves. “Oh, it’s a food desert. Nobody comes in. Well, they don’t do anything when someone comes out either,” Horrigan said.

He said he tried to contact council member Mitch Nowakowski for help, but never heard back. Nowakowski said he deferred to Broadway market manager Kathy Peterson, who said she was negotiating with Upstate Supermarket, which has nine Save-A-Lot stores in New York.

“I want to keep Save-A-Lot and a grocer at Broadway Market. But I also want to protect the financial interests of the City of Buffalo, which owns and operates Broadway Market,” Nowakowski said. “So making sure that a lease that is fair on both ends is given to the potential new operator and the City of Buffalo is something that I’m really looking forward to achieving.”

Peterson did not return calls for comment, but Upstate Supermarket said it walked away from the deal three or four months ago and was no longer interested in the store.

Adam Abdul, manager of Broadway Seafood at Broadway Market, said the closure of Save-A-Lot would likely hurt his store’s sales.

“It’s a bad thing for the market,” he said. ” It is not like it used to be. It’s a bit empty.

He worries what will happen when the site becomes even emptier, with the loss of what has always attracted consumer traffic.

“Save-A-Lot was attracting a lot of people at the Broadway Market. This helped us,” said Abdul. “I think with them closing, a lot of people won’t come to the market.”

Last month, six Family Dollar stores closed on Buffalo’s East Side as part of a wave of corporate closures. Parent company Dollar Tree blamed the move on inflation, shoplifting, declining sales and Covid-19-era reductions in government food aid. The group announced in March that it would close almost 1,000 stores over the next few years – 600 this year and phase out another 370 as their leases expire.

Save-A-Lot opened at Broadway Market in 1998, the second of its kind to open in Western New York. It replaced a 6,500-square-foot Tops Markets that closed in 1997. Tops closed another store at 1770 Broadway in 2019.

Today, with two miles between Tops on Jefferson and Aldi on Broadway, the distance to go shopping is long, especially in a poor neighborhood with a large concentration of people whose primary mode of transportation is walking.

It’s a hardship for residents, said Charles Lindsey, a marketing professor at the University at Buffalo School of Management.

“Walking is getting difficult. With these bags or a trolley, taking the bus becomes more inconvenient. It takes more time,” he said.

When a racist shooting closed the Tops Markets store on Jefferson Avenue in 2022, it shone a spotlight on the food deserts of Buffalo’s East Side. In an urban neighborhood, a food desert is an expanse of at least one mile with limited access to affordable, nutritious food, according to the National Institutes of Health. Food deserts often occur in low-income urban or rural communities.

When the Tops store in Jefferson closed for renovations after the May 14 murders, residents had few choices about where to buy fresh fruits and vegetables or get their prescription medications. Tops handed out free produce and food outside the store and provided shuttles to and from its Niagara Street store.

Living in food deserts has broad implications for residents, Lindsey said, including malnutrition, lack of nutrients and all kinds of illnesses, from cardiovascular disease to diabetes.

“It’s just harder to eat healthy,” he says.

The loss of a grocery store does not bode well for Broadway Market’s major plans for a thorough grocery-focused transformation, funded by Empire State Development’s East Side Corridor economic development project through of the New York State Regional Revitalization Program.

The planned $50 million overhaul of the property would make it a multicultural fresh produce market, offering regional and international produce. Plans call for opening the ground floor exterior to retail and attractions such as restaurants, produce shops and international grocery stores that spill out onto the sidewalk, as well as creating an entertainment space and leisure activities on the roof of the market.

Businesses are less likely to invest in low-income neighborhoods and stores have less longevity, Lindsey said.

“Low income, high unemployment, less business, maybe higher insurance costs to locate in those areas,” Lindsey said. “We’re not just talking about resistance to opening stores in these areas, but it’s more likely that stores like the Save-A-Lot store that open in these areas, there’s a greater likelihood that they close.”