Safeway Denies It’s Closing in Long Reach

A company spokesman has shot down speculation that the Safeway supermarket in the Long Reach Village Center will be closing.

“Right now that store is open and no announcements have been made to be anything but open,” said Craig Muckle, spokesman for Safeway. “We’ll continue to move forward with our business there.”

Rumors that the Safeway in Long Reach might be shutting its doors surfaced last month, when the closing of its pharmacy led to online postings about the store’s future.

“I just came from Safeway in Long Reach. The pharmacy is closed, all patients have been transferred to Target on Dobbin [Road]. The employees are concerned about rumors the store is closing,” wrote a commenter named Jen on the Tales of Two Cities blog in early April.

Raymond Gabler, writing on his blog Time 2 reTHINK in mid-April, said he’d gotten confirmation. 

“I swung by there this evening and a little birdie told me that it was ‘official’ they will be closing their doors in June (not sure if they meant beginning or end),” he wrote. 

Muckle said he didn’t know why the store’s pharmacy had been shuttered.

“Sometimes if we close a pharmacy, it’s just the business is not doing as well as we’d like it to do there,” he said. “It’s kind of like anything else: We’re trying to make sure that whatever we spend our efforts on is going well.”

The Safeway in Long Reach is “boxed in by some pretty formidable competition,” noted Dennis Lane, who, along with running the Tales of Two Cities blog, is senior vice president of commercial real estate firm Ryan Commercial.

“Target, with its recent expansion of grocery items, is less than a mile to the south and a newer Giant [off Centre Park Drive] is a less than two miles to the north,” Lane wrote. “When Wegmans opens next year [off McGaw Road], also less than two miles away, the situation for the 38-year-old anchor store will get even worse.”

There are several other grocery shopping options within miles, including a Trader Joe’s and a Costco in the Gateway Overlook shopping center, a BJ’s Wholesale Club in the Snowden Square Shopping Center and a Wal-mart in Dobbin Center.