West Hartford News: The Long Island-based company that bought the Enfield Square Mall property here in Connecticut now has purchased the Westfield Meriden mall ... Burt Flickinger, managing director of New York City-based Strategic Resource Group, said two possibilities for filling those anchor spots are grocery chains, Whole Foods Market and Rochester, N.Y.-based Wegmans. “It’s something that would be worth considering for an upscale grocer like Wegmans or Stew Leonard’s,” he said. Stew Leonard’s opened a store in the Paramus Park Mall in mid-September 2019, Flickinger said, and Wegmans opened an anchor store about a month later in retail development in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Wegmans has no Connecticut locations, which Flickinger said leaves the chain with “a doughnut hole, between its Massachusetts and New York State locations.” A company spokeswoman said the chain is always looking for new opportunities, but added that Wegmans only opens two or three stores per year and already has a list of 11 stores in six states among its list of future locations. Flickinger, whose company has done research on the Connecticut market for Amazon, said the e-commerce giant is looking to pair new Whole Foods locations with the chain’s nearby distribution centers. Other potential tenants Namdar might seek to lure to fill its anchor vacancies are BJs Wholesale Club or rival Costco.
The Meriden Mall site meets that criteria. Whole Foods has a distribution center a few miles away on East Johnson Avenue in Cheshire, and in February, a 86,000-square-foot expansion to the facility, which will double its size, got underway. Flickinger said he expects Namdar to move quickly to fill one of the anchor vacancies at the Meriden Mall, located at 470 Lewis Ave.