Waldbaums history

By 1938 there was a second Waldbaum's in Brooklyn's Coney Island section.

When Izzy died in 1948, his son Ira took over the then existing six stores in Brooklyn.

The first Waldbaum's supermarket was opened in 1951 in Flushing, Queens.

Net retail sales reached $55.2 million in 1960 and net income amounted to $660,000.

In 1961, the company went public by selling shares of common stock.

Waldbaum's acquired Michael's Fair-Mart Food Stores, Inc., a 13-unit chain with annual sales of more than $15 million, in 1962 for cash and stock.

The company moved its headquarters from Brooklyn to Garden City, Long Island, in 1964 and the following year was operating 60 stores, including units in the borough of Staten Island and in Westchester County, north of New York City.

Sales reached $197.4 million and net income totaled $2 million in 1967.

Net sales reached $1.1 billion in the last year of the decade, compared with $281 million in 1969, and net income was $7.8 million, compared with $2.7 million in 1969.

After only three years, Waldbaum's pulled out of the state in 1971.

Waldbaum's moved its headquarters and distribution center farther east in 1974, to Central Islip, Long Island.

At approximately 8:15 a.m. on August 2, 1978, a fire was reported at the store in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

By the early 1980's, the chain was grossing $1.376 billion at 140 supermarkets in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

In 1983 Waldbaum's opened its first "Megamart," a 55,000-square-foot store in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

By 1984, it had cut the number of its stores below 1,000, its low point, and laid off thousands of employees, Since then, the chain has grown in both number and size of stores, concentrating its operations on the Eastern Seaboard.

In 1985 Waldbaum earned about $17 million, on sales of $1.8 billion.

Late in life, even after nearly all her family's stock in the Waldbaum's supermarkets was sold to the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company in 1986, Mrs.

According to a New York state agency, the company failed 47 percent of its store inspections for sanitation in 1990, compared with an average of 26 percent for nine other major supermarket chains.

In 1991 a 60,000-square-foot Waldbaum's had opened in the South Bronx, only a few blocks from Yankee Stadium.

In 1992 a Teamsters local, representing the company's warehouse workers, urged a consumer boycott to win a contract.

In 1993 one food broker described Waldbaum under A&P as "a typical story of taking a racehorse and turning it into a camel.

A 1994 survey found that Waldbaum's 27 stores in New York City had 12 percent of the city's market share in its field and ranked first in the borough of Queens.

A&P attempted to improve Waldbaum's operations by relinquishing its responsibility for the chain's buying in 1995.

Nevertheless, the subsidiary was still said to be a drag on A&P's profits in 1996.

On August 13, 2010, A&P announced that it would close twenty-five stores as the parent of Waldbaum's began the implementation and execution phase of its comprehensive turnaround; these stores closed in October 2010, including stores in Centereach and Levittown, Long Island.

In February 2011, A&P announced thirty-two additional store closings, including three Long Island Waldbaum's: Farmingdale, Smithtown, and Valley Stream on April 15, 2011.

In January 2012, A&P announced half a dozen additional closings on Long Island.