The East Side of Buffalo is losing something it desperately needs – a grocery store.
Save-A-Lot will close its Broadway Market location next week, leaving Tops Markets and Aldi as the only traditional supermarkets to serve the giant neighborhood.
The closure of Save-A-Lot is a blow to the region, coming shortly after six Family Dollar stores closed in the community, leaving residents with few places to buy groceries and household goods like cleaning supplies and medicine at affordable prices.
The closing will also be a loss to the Broadway Market, tenants said. The bustling, low-priced supermarket attracted foot traffic that will soon be missing at the public market, meaning other tenants and vendors will soon have a smaller audience of customers to sell to outside of the busy Easter season.
Since the racist mass shooting at Tops Markets on Jefferson Avenue in 2022, food access has become a more visible priority in Buffalo, with an array of public, non-profit and corporate entities stepping up to support solutions. At the same time, the problem of hunger continues to grow, and there is a lot more work to be done, community advocates and food providers say.
Another Save-A-Lot franchisee, Upstate Supermarket, was hoping to take over the Save-A-Lot store for the cost of its inventory but wasn’t able to come to an agreement on lease terms with the Broadway Market.
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Ron Horrigan, the owner of the Broadway Market Save-A-Lot, said he has been losing money on the location for years.
“Everything went downhill after we got looted,” he said, referring to looting incidents that happened in the store during the Christmas blizzard of 2022.
Insurance on the store came with a $5,000 deductible and didn’t include the cost of cleanup and restocking, he said. By earlier this year, foot traffic had dropped to about half of what it was, and problems have been exacerbated by the end to Covid-19-era food benefits that had increased the average SNAP benefits by about $200 per family, he said.
The store has also seen an uptick in shoplifting, which is already worse than at Horrigan’s other stores in Chaffee, Cheektowaga and North Collins, he said. At the same time, minimum wage has increased, making labor costs higher. The cost of having food delivered to his store by suppliers have risen by $21,000, he said. He is six months late with his rent payments.
Horrigan met with Mayor Byron Brown seeking financial help but said his sales were too high to qualify for grocery grants the city previously offered. He is scheduled to meet with city officials again on Wednesday but said it’s likely too late to save his store.
“The city, they all cry when somebody leaves. ‘Oh, it’s a food desert. Nobody’s coming in.’ Well they don’t do nothing when somebody’s going out, neither,” Horrigan said.
He said he tried to contact Council Member Mitch Nowakowski for help but never heard back. Nowakowski said he had deferred to Broadway Market Manager Kathy Peterson, who had said she was negotiating with Upstate Supermarket, which owns nine Save-A-Lot stores in New York.
“I want to keep Save-A-Lot and a grocer in the Broadway Market. But I also want to protect the financial interests of the City of Buffalo, which owns and operates the Broadway Market,” Nowakowski said. “So making sure that a fair lease on both ends to the potential new operator and the City of Buffalo is something that I’m really looking forward to getting done.”
Peterson did not return calls for comment, but Upstate Supermarket said it walked away from the deal three or four months ago and is no longer interested in the store.
Adam Abdul, a manager at Broadway Seafood at the Broadway Market, said the closure of Save-A-Lot will likely hurt his store’s sales.
“It’s a bad thing for the market,” he said. “It’s not like it was before. It’s kind of empty.”
He worries what will happen when it gets even emptier, with the loss of what has been a steady draw of consumer traffic.
The East Side will lose six Family Dollar locations in the coming weeks. It is part of a wave of store closures at the company, and the East Side is being hit particularly hard.
“Save-A-Lot used to bring a lot of people to the Broadway Market. It helped us,” Abdul said. “I think, with them closing down, a lot of people won’t be coming to the market anymore.”
Last month, six Family Dollar stores closed on the East Side of Buffalo as part of a wave of closures in the company. Parent company Dollar Tree blamed inflation, shoplifting, declining sales and a reduction in Covid-19-era government food benefits for the move. It said in March that it would close nearly 1,000 stores over the next few years – 600 this year and phasing out another 370 as their leases expire.
Save-A-Lot opened at the 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.
Now with two miles between Tops on Jefferson and Aldi on Broadway, it’s a long distance to go for groceries – especially in an impoverished neighborhood with a large concentration of people whose main mode of transportation is walking.
That is a hardship for residents, said Charles Lindsey, a marketing professor at the University at Buffalo School of Management.
“Walking, that becomes difficult. Carrying those bags or a cart, taking the bus becomes more inconvenient. It takes longer,” he said.
When a racist mass shooting closed the Tops Markets store on Jefferson Avenue in 2022, it shone a spotlight on food deserts on the East Side of Buffalo. In an urban neighborhood, a food desert is a stretch of at least one mile with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, according to the National Institutes of Health. Food deserts often occur in low-income urban or rural communities.
When the Tops store on Jefferson closed for remodeling after the May 14 murders, residents were left with few choices as to where to buy fresh fruits and vegetables or to get their prescription medications. Tops gave away free produce and food outside the store and ran shuttles to and from its Niagara Street store.
Living in food deserts has broad implications for residents, Lindsey said, including malnourishment, a lack of nutrients, and all kinds of diseases from cardiovascular disease to diabetes.
“It’s just harder to eat healthy,” he said.
The loss of a grocery store doesn’t bode well for big plans the Broadway Market has for an extensive, grocery-focused makeover, funded by Empire State Development’s East Side Corridor Economic Development project through the New York State Regional Revitalization Program.
The planned $50 million overhaul of the property would turn it into a multicultural fresh food market, with regional and international foods. Plans call for opening up the ground-floor exterior to retail and attractions such as restaurants, fresh food stores, and international groceries that spill out onto the sidewalk, as well as creating space for entertainment and recreational uses on the market’s rooftop.
Corporations are less likely to invest in low-income neighborhoods, and the stores have less longevity, Lindsey said.
“Low income, high unemployment, not as much business, maybe higher insurance costs of locating in those those areas,” Lindsey said. “We’re talking not only resistance to opening stores in those areas, but it’s more likely that stores like the Save-A-Lot store that do open in those areas, there’s a greater likelihood that they’re going to close.”