Walmart seeks to expand Islandia store into a supercenter with a grocery store
Walmart, which has been attempting to gain more grocery traction on Long Island, is planning to expand its store in Islandia into a supercenter with a grocery store.
Walmart is the nation’s biggest seller of groceries, but it doesn’t even crack the top five on Long Island, where supermarket competition is fierce and growing.
So, Walmart again is seeking a bigger slice of Long Island's grocery sales by planning to expand its Islandia store into a supercenter with a full-service grocery store — in a shopping center that lost its Stop & Shop supermarket three years ago.
Walmart has gone the expansion route before on Long Island. Two of its three supercenters — in Valley Stream and Farmingdale — started out as regular discount stores before growing with the addition of supermarkets more than a decade after originally opening.
“Walmart is going to reap more than double in sales [with a supercenter] versus a conventional discount store, which they operate now. And they’ll also penetrate other types of retail by offering a one-stop shop solution,” said Wantagh native Jeff Metzger, founder and publisher emeritus of Food Trade News, a Columbia, Maryland-based publication.
WHAT NEWSDAY FOUND
- Walmart is seeking to expand its 22-year-old Islandia store into a supercenter with a full-service grocery store.
- The retailer previously has turned two other stores on Long Island — in Farmingdale and Valley Stream — into supercenters by expanding them and adding grocery stores.
- Walmart, which is the largest grocery retailer in the country, is trying to gain more market share on Long Island, where Stop & Shop sells the most groceries.
In Islandia, Walmart wants to expand its store by 49,451 square feet, or 38%, to a total size of 178,206 square feet for a supercenter, according to building plans submitted to the village.
At its meeting Monday night, the village’s board of zoning appeals tabled until next month a vote on the landlord's application for a variance to add a drive-thru to a pharmacy, which is part of the expansion plan for the Walmart at 1850 Veterans Memorial Hwy. in the Islandia Shopping Center. The board said it wanted the landlord to provide financial information showing the financial benefits of Walmart having a drive-thru lane before voting.
That approval and resolutions of the village engineer’s questions about the expansion are needed before the final plans can go before Islandia’s board of trustees for a decision on approval, which likely would take place in three to six months, said Gerald Peters, the village’s manager and building inspector.
A firm that co-owns the Islandia Shopping Center submitted the plans for the Walmart expansion to the village Feb. 28, but the approval process was delayed because the application was incomplete, Peters said.
Walmart Inc., headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, declined to comment specifically on its plans for the Islandia store.
“We’ve been committed to Long Island for more than 30 years and continue looking for opportunities to expand and better serve communities. We don’t have any information to share, right now,” spokesman Charles Crowson said in an email.
Blumenfeld Development Group, or BDG, in Syosset and Taconic Capital Advisors L.P. in Manhattan co-own the Islandia Shopping Center.
BDG, which manages the property, declined Newsday’s request for comment.
Walmart’s Islandia store opened Jan. 22, 2003, the same day the retailer opened its South Setauket store.
The Islandia Shopping Center lost its full-service supermarket in 2022, when a 69,000-square-foot Stop & Shop closed. The supermarket opened in 2001 after Stop & Shop took over an Edwards supermarket. Edwards was a sister chain to Stop & Shop.
Betting on groceries
Walmart Inc. has 14 stores on Long Island, including a Sam’s Club in Medford; a Neighborhood Market, which is a grocery store, in Levittown; and three supercenters.
That is about 30% fewer than the number of stores operated by the largest grocery seller on Long Island, Stop & Shop, which has 46 supermarkets in the area.
Walmart's ability to open more stores on Long Island has been stymied by the availability of the space sizes it wants, said Brian Schuster, a vice chairman at Ripco Real Estate LLC in Woodbury who focuses on retail.
Walmart wants "prototypes, which, over the years, have gotten bigger and bigger. And today, they want at least 150,000 [square] feet. Show me where there's a 150,000-square-foot building available on Long Island or ... 15 to 20 acres of land that you could build a big-box retail store with parking. It doesn't exist," he said.
So, Walmart has been attempting to gain more grocery traction on Long Island by expanding existing stores.
The retailer's Valley Stream store, which opened in 2003, became Walmart's first supercenter on Long Island in 2014, when it was expanded by 41% to 169,000 square feet.
In 2020, Walmart expanded its then-13-year-old Farmingdale store by 40% to create a 205,000-square-foot supercenter.
The retailer did open a completely new supercenter, a 197,000-square-foot store, in a new retail and residential development called The Boulevard in Yaphank in 2021.
First launched by Walmart in 1988, supercenters are set up to be one-stop shopping destinations that include full-service supermarkets, clothes, home furnishings and electronics, as well as specialty shops, such as nail and hair salons, and fast-food restaurants.
The average size of a Walmart supercenter is 178,000 square feet, while the average size of a regular Walmart discount store is 105,000 square feet, according to the retailer's annual report released in April.
Supercenters are the retailer’s preferred store format, partly because groceries are the biggest contributor to profits. Groceries accounted for nearly 60% of Walmart’s $462.4 billion in total net sales in its fiscal year 2025, which ended Jan. 31, according to the annual report.
In the United States, Walmart Inc. has 5,206 stores, including 3,560 supercenters, 354 discount stores, 672 Neighborhood Markets and 600 Sam’s Clubs.
In January 2024, Walmart announced that, over a five-year period, more than 150 stores would be built as or converted to supercenters or Neighborhood Markets.
During a visit to Walmart's Farmingdale store Friday, company executives told Newsday that since the spring, the retailer has been expanding and improving its grocery selection nationwide by increasing its variety of produce and organic products, and changing packaging to extend the freshness of vegetables and fruit.
Nationwide, Walmart sells more groceries — by far — than any competitor. Walmart has 21% of the grocery market share among all the retailers in the country, including drugstores and convenience stores, while Kroger ranks second, with 8.5%, according to Numerator, a Chicago-based market research firm.
But on Long Island, Walmart ranks seventh, with 5.7% of the market share, according to a June report from Food Trade News.
Though Quincy, Massachusetts-based Stop & Shop reigns on Long Island, its dominance is slipping as discounters and specialty stores entice shoppers away from traditional supermarkets.
Stop & Shop’s 46 stores in the region account for 16.6% of the market share when compared to all types of grocery sellers, according to Food Trade News.
Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.
