Big Y delays Longmeadow store expansion until 2018

Feb. 2, 2017 | Chris Goudreau
cgoudreau@thereminder.com

Alex Belyshev (right), owner of Alex’s Bagel Shop, stands beside his wife Nina (left). The couple has operated the bagel shop for the past decade and are in the stages of finalizing a lease for a new location somewhere on Longmeadow Street.
Reminder Publications file photo

LONGMEADOW – Big Y is delaying its plans to renovate and expand its store at 802 Williams St. until the beginning of 2018 in order to allow Alex’s Bagel Shop find a new location.

Mathieu D’Amour, vice president of real estate and development for Big Y, told Reminder Publications Big Y decided to grant Alex’s Bagel Shop an additional three to six months to allow the business to relocate. Big Y originally told its tenant, Alex’s Bagel Shop, it would need to leave the location by the beginning of 2017.

“He was pretty close on a location toward the end of the year, so we made the decision internally to give him an extension,” he explained. “We did it in good faith because we believe he’s pretty close … We didn’t want to throw him out without that opportunity to transition his business without a business interruption.”

Alex Belyshev, owner of Alex’s Bagel Shop, said a new location on Route 5 on Longmeadow Street might become official in the coming weeks. He declined to name the exact location of the new space at this time.

Belyshev took over the bagel shop on his own a decade ago. Prior to that, the business was known as Kimmel’s Bagel Shop, at which Belyshez worked for 19 years.

D’Amour said the Big Y supermarket on Williams Street is approximately 24,000 square feet.

“The additional space we are adding with the former hardware store, barber, and bagel shop amounts to close to 5,000 square feet of sales floor,” he added. “In short the addition of this space will grow the sales floor and the customers experience by an increase of 25 percent.”

Brightwood Hardware, which was located next door to Alex’s Bagel Shop, joined with Carr Hardware and opened a new 11,000-square-foot store in Enfield, CT, on Aug. 31, 2016. The former Chippy’s Barber Shop space would also be used in Big Y’s renovation.

D’Amour said he would like to start the project in January 2018 and end by the end of the summer of that year.

“A lot of the work in the adjacent space won’t affect the regular shopping pattern, but typically when we do major construction that starts to affect traffic flow we try to shoot for the summer months when the kids are out of school, families are away on vacation – it’s typically the slower time of the year for customer traffic flow,” he explained. “We really prefer to have our projects finished by the end of the summer, so that we’re in good standing for the holiday business; really kicking off in September when back to school time happens and straight through the holiday season.”

He added some of the offerings that would be added to the store include new food offerings such as a pizza shop, a stir-fry station, meals to go offerings, and increased organic and local produce.

“We’re looking forward to adding some offerings to the store,” he noted. “It’s been a long time coming. We feel as sense of obligation to enhance the store for the community. We were able to do it in surrounding towns. A lot of that folks that shop in Longmeadow also shop in other towns. If they go into East Longmeadow, we were able to make a major capital investment in there about a year ago. We just, this past year, finished a major capital reinvestment in the Cooley [Street] store [in Springfield]. They have a lot of these new and modern offerings that we’re unfortunately not able to facilitate in Longmeadow as it stands to day, but we’re looking forward to [bringing] those offerings to Longmeadow in the next year.”

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