A White Plains bankruptcy court judge approved Best Yet Market Inc.’s $4.43 million bid to purchase five Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. supermarkets on Friday, which includes the Waldbaum’s at 40 Great Neck Road in Great Neck for $1.5 million.
Best Yet Market, a Bethpage-based family-owned company that operates supermarkets under the name “Best Market,” was also approved to buy a Waldbaum’s in Selden and Pathmarks in Shirley, Islip, and West Babylon.
“Best Market currently operates 20 stores in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut including 16 communities on Long Island, and we are enthusiastic about the opportunity to serve Great Neck as well,” Best Yet Market President and CEO Rebecca Philbert said in a statement following the agreement. “We look forward to bringing our fresh, healthy, ‘better for you’ brand to new customers and are confident that they will be excited by the transformation our stores represent.”
After two rounds of auctions in October, Great Neck’s Waldbaum’s received no bids, leaving residents, employees, and public officials unsure of the future of the supermarket.
Neal Kaplan, the managing partner of Kabro Associates, a real estate development and management firm that owns the shopping center where Waldbaum’s is located, said the court said the current store is to close by the end of the month, but he expects it to close sooner than that.
Kaplan added that rumors of a year-long renovation period were untrue and that Best Yet Market was “going to open as soon as possible and renovate as they progress to service the community.”
Alejandra Soto, a spokesperson for Best Yet Market, said there was no timetable for when the new supermarket will begin operating.
“There is no timeline for renovations. Each store is going to be looked at on a case-by-case basis,” she said. “Some may be in fantastic shape but just need some fresh painting, but some of them the floors might be chipped or the roof might be leaking, or things can be out of date. It depends on what they find.”
Soto added that as soon as Best Yet Market gets keys to the store, a team will assess what renovations need to be made and how long the store conversion process will take.
Great Neck Chamber of Commerce President Hooshang Nematzadeh said finding a replacement supermarket was good news for the people of Great Neck.
“To have another operator so fast taking the place and especially a very good operator to come in is fantastic news for Great Neck,” Nematzadeh said. “Then we are not deprived of a supermarket.”
Village of Great Neck Plaza Mayor Jean Celender said the village worked hard to find a new supermarket operator and was “thrilled” when a bid was submitted.
“We’ve been talking to the shopping center owner and meeting with prospective supermarkets. We sent packages out and they were one of the stores. I don’t know if that had any effect but we’re hoping maybe it did. We encouraged them to take another look and they submitted a bid,” Celender said. “It’s a complicated court proceeding that’s not anything the village is a party to but we have been following it and have been very proactive to try to encourage supermarkets to want to go in and submit a bid and service the community.”
She added that the village would continue to work with Best Yet Market representatives “to find out their plans for getting into the store to start servicing the community.”
Soto said both parties and the bankruptcy judge agreed on Nov. 3 that Best Yet Market would make a “good faith, best effort of an offer of employment” to at least 25 percent of employees from the current store.
She added that Best Market would hire employees based on who was the best person for the job and not who had been working at Waldbaum’s the longest.
“Employees might be concerned, but again, the job posts will go up and people will apply and the best person will be hired,” Soto said. “It’s about who the best person for the job is and what the fair pay is.”
Of A&P’s 51 supermarkets on Long Island, 33 have been bought or bid on, five were closed in October, and 13 remain unsold.
Efforts to reach A&P officials were unavailing.
