A new King Kullen supermarket is coming to Garden City Park this fall in the location vacated last fall by Pathmark in the shopping center at the intersection of Jericho Turnpike and Nassau Boulevard.
Bethpage-based King Kullen Grocery Co. Inc. recently signed a lease for the 51,000-square-foot space and started interior construction at the site, according to H.A. Johnston, King Kullen director of real estate.
Johnston said the supermarket chain had been negotiating a lease since last October and expected to open the new store sometime in October.
“We have a store in New Hyde Park and Mineola. We didn’t have anything servicing the Garden City Park area,” Johnston said.
Despite the close proximity of its other stores to the Garden City Park location, Johnston said that the company saw a need in the area.
“It’s a dense area with a lot of households. We feel it’s an underserved market,” Johnston said.
Johnston said the store will employ somewhere between 90 and 100 employees, who will all be members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1500. Johnston said the company is already accepting applications for the positions that will be available when the store opens.
That could be good news for some of the workers who lost their jobs when Pathmark closed its doors.
“They will be union jobs. The jobs will be with our local,” Patrick Purcell, union representative of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1500. “We will do everything to let the former Pathmark workers to know that a new store is opening up.”
Most of the 120 to 130 workers in the store were relocated to other stores in the area, including Pathmarks in New Hyde Park and Franklin Square, Purcell said at the time. But he said some workers turned down jobs with Pathmark in a Staten Island because of the commuting distance.
Because the space is being leased by another company, the union members who remain unemployed do not have what Purcell called “recall rights” to secure a new job. But Purcell said he expected King Kullen would try to “strike a balance” between hiring employees in their other stores seeking full-time employment and hiring the people who lost their jobs when the Pathmark store closed.
Purcell said King Kullen has a good reputation as an employer.
“King Kullen is a very good employer. They really look out for their folks,” Purcell said.
There are signs of machinery inside the store, apparently to renovate what remains a barren location at present.
King Kullen currently has 47 stores in Nassau and Suffolk Counties and on Staten Island.
Anyone in applying for employment at the Garden City Park store can call King Kullen corporate headquarters at 516-733-7100.
