You could have bought everything in the store and still used the “10 items or less” checkout lane.
Bensonhurst’s now-shuttered Waldbaum’s supermarket sold off the remaining stock on its mostly empty shelves — including cigarettes for a scant $3 a pack — and closed it’s doors for good on Nov. 19. But longtime shoppers weren’t excited about the deals and are instead demanding another grocery store open in Waldbaum’s place to serve hungry Bensonhursters — particularly seniors, said one protester at a rally in front of the New Utrecht Avenue store on Friday.
“You need a supermarket here,” said Thomas Massina, a 37-year neighborhood resident. “How are senior citizens going to go shopping? They’ve got to walk 10 blocks down the street now?”
Waldbaum’s parent company A&P went belly-up over the summer and sold off Waldbaum’s and Pathmark stores to competitors such as Key Food and Compare Foods. The company was in talks to cede the New Utrecht Avenue store to Key Food, but it pulled out, forcing the location to go to auction.
But there is hope for area cooks.
The owner of a Key Food on 18th and Bath avenues wants to open hire back the axed employees and open a market on the bones of Waldbaum’s. He already has a 49-year lease on the parking lot in front of the shop and could get the store up and running in no time, he said.
“I could open on the second day [after the sale],” he said.
Local pols and honchos from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce are petitioning United States Bankruptcy Court Judge Robert D. Drain to only approve bidders who would open another supermarket in the upcoming auction.
But, during a hearing over the sale of an A&P market in Yonkers earlier this month, Drain noted he did not have the authority to mandate what bidders do with the property they’ve won, according to local media accounts.
Meantime, locals will have to find new shopping routines, which may mean breaking holiday traditions, another longtime shopper said.
“I used to buy my turkeys here — this is the first year I’m not buying a turkey here,” said 61-year-old Phyllis Di Virgilio. “I knew where everything was in each aisle and knew all the people that worked there.”
