A bankrupt supermarket owner recruited by Mount Vernon”™s mayor to open a grocery in the city”™s Fleetwood district blamed the mayor and city officials for his business”™s failure only eight months after its grand opening. He plans to sue Mount Vernon for millions of dollars in U.S. Bankruptcy Court.
“They totally, literally stabbed me in the back,” Salvatore Gizzo, president of Fleetwood Food Corp., said of Mount Vernon city officials. Gizzo on March 13 locked the doors on his company”™s 11,000-square-foot Key Food supermarket at 42 W. Broad St. after filing for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in White Plains. He expects his New York City landlord, who is owed $30,000 in back rent, to take possession of the building.
Mount Vernon Mayor Clinton I. Young Jr.”™s office did not return a call for comment.
Only last July, Gizzo posed for photos with Young at a ribbon-cutting ceremony outside his Fleetwood store. A line of waiting customers reportedly stretched around the corner on Fleetwood Avenue. But that level of customer traffic apparently was short-lived, and Gizzo claimed the city”™s failure to deliver on promised parking garage, lighting and street improvements kept customers away.
His Key Food store was to replace the Fleetwood A&P Supermarket, one block south at 24 W. Grand St., that closed in early 2009. The former A&P site was converted to a CVSÂ Â Pharmacy. Lacking a supermarket within walking distance for elderly residents, “The entire Fleetwood area was in an uproar,” Gizzo recalled.
Gizzo since 2003 had operated Samba Na Brasa, a Brazilian steakhouse, at the Broad Street address in Fleetwood; he also owns the Surf Club, a wedding reception and events facility in New Rochelle.
With A&P closing, “The mayor came to me one day and he said, ”˜I need a big favor,”™” the restaurateur recalled of a 2009 meeting with Young. “”˜Will you consider turning your restaurant (in)to a supermarket?”™… He said, ”˜I”™ll give you whatever you need to get the thing done.”™”
Gizzo said Young promised to expedite the permit approvals needed for the project.
Gizzo calculated that based on the Fleetwood A&P”™s reported $250,000 in weekly business, his grocery store could take in $50,000 in weekly profits. “It was kind of a no-brainer,” he said of his decision to convert his business.
Gizzo signed a license agreement with the city. The city agreed to restrict a ground-level parking area of its nearby municipal parking garage on Broad Street to Key Food customers and install and maintain lighting and security cameras in the garage, which Gizzo said is “like a dungeon.”
City officials, he said, also agreed to other parking and landscaping improvements designed to make the neighborhood and city parking garage cleaner, more accessible and less darkly menacing for grocery shoppers.
Most of the improvements have not been completed, he said. Another item on the business owner”™s to-do list for the city, repairs to a broken elevator in the parking garage, still had not been made as Key Food”™s last customers this month wandered down aisles of largely unstocked shelves.
“All I know is that everything we were promised by the mayor and the city, we got zero,” said Gizzo, who invested $2.5 million in the business conversion. “I would never have made that investment if we didn”™t have that agreement.”
Gizzo said Young also failed to deliver speedy permit approvals. He said the city took nine months to approve store plans, while he paid $20,000 a month in rent and consultant”™s fees through the delays. “They really stalled it and stalled it,” he said. “They just cost me a ton of money.”
The supermarket owner said he also was hampered by delays in obtaining state lottery, beer and food stamp licenses until recently.
Key Food in 2010 also saw a competitor, Harvest Field Market, open a store one block away at 75 Fleetwood Ave., adjacent to the neighborhood”™s new CVSÂ Pharmacy. As a condition for converting his restaurant, Gizzo said he had an oral guarantee from city officials that no rival grocery of more than 1,500 square feet would be allowed to open in Fleetwood.
Gizzo”™s bankruptcy attorney in Harrison, Jonathan S. Pasternak, in court papers said the new supermarket”™s revenue peaked at $130,000 weekly late last year, but had since plummeted to less than $50,000 a week. Gizzo calculated he would break even at $90,000 a week.
The Key Food owner listed approximately $3.1 million in liabilities against approximately $2.78 million in assets. Two contractors on the supermarket build-out are owed $1.8 million and the store”™s parent company on Staten Island, Key Food Co-operative Inc., is owed approximately $579,000.
Gizzo said the store”™s closing is “thanks to the city that wanted and begged for a supermarket there for one year, two years, and then went totally against us. If I got what I wanted from the city, the supermarket would have made it.”
Pasternak said the Key Food supermarket is for sale and already has attracted several interested buyers. The store could reopen under new management or new ownership, he said.
As for Gizzo, “We”™re not going to reopen,” he said. “We”™re out of business, and that”™s it.”
Mr. Golden, I really have to question your ability to reason and to question what are very dishonest reasons given by Gizzo for closing the Key Food supermarket.
Regarding the parking garage, that is the same parking garage that served the Rite Aid (right next door to Key Food), Joe’s Pizza (a decades old restaurant across the street), Yannantuono Burr Davis Sharpe Funeral Home (another decades old business directly across the street) and many other longstanding businesses in that retail area. It’s been adequate for those businesses for decades, so I cannot see what problem Gizzo has with it. He was given about 2/3 of the entire lower parking level and his crappy store never had more than half of the spaces dedicated exclusively to him filled. It would seen that an astute reporter would have called him on this. Perhaps if he didn’t sell rotten fruit and nearly expired meat he would have had more customers.
The garage elevator has no bearing on this since none of the Key Food customers would have used this elevator.
Mr. Golden, I also cannot understand how you failed to call Gizzo on his BS about not allowing a competitor within 1,500 feet of his business. That seems ludicrous to me and it is funny how the Harvest Field Market had no problems with competition, which leads me to believe that Gizzo’s biggest problem is that he has no clue how to run a supermarket.
Also, what kind of fool would sign a 20 year lease, yes a 20 year lease at $20k/month for that location? He formerly operated a Brazilian restaurant there that failed and when he tried to turn it into a nightclub, that failed too.
At one point, Gizzo was doing $130k/week months after opening, which was well above his $90k/week break even point. Then his sales plummeted to 50k/week??? He has nerve to blame that on anyone but himself and his poor business acumen.
While almost all other businesses on that strip have been successful for years, Gizzo’s efforts quickly run out of steam.
Clearly, Gizzo does not know how to run a business.
Talk to people in the neighborhood to get the real story about what happened- the store was too expensive! The A and P that was in the neighborhood before CVS was affordable and very busy.
He got alot of customers in the beginning at Key Food and the place was busy but then he raised his prices after the store was open for awhile and people who could get to another store by car did just that. There’s a Stop and Shop just minutes away in the Cross County Shopping Center in Yonkers. Just one example- Stoneyfield yogurt at Stop and Shop usually about 89 cents or so. At Keyfood- 1.29 each. The eggs were the most expensive of any place in the area, including Trader Joes, Stop and Shop and the other places in the neighborhood and the 7-11 over the bridge in Yonkers.
You could make a really long list of stuff that was priced ALOT higher there. He thought he could gouge customers, all he did was gouge senior citizens, the ones who would have the most difficulty in getting to another store. There are alot of seniors in the area. The neighborhood has a lot of people, surrounded by apartment buildings and alot of people WALK, so the garage was not an issue like he’s trying to say. That garage is busy all day with people who are shopping and dining in other places in the neighborhood. To call it ‘darkly menacing’ and ‘dungeon like’ is just ridiculous and simply a lie. the article doesn’t mention that the city took out parking meters for him. 3/4 of the lower level was converted to free parking for his store; those spaces have been available right from the beginning. The local funeral home also has parking spaces put aside for them and those spaces are always in use too.
People talk. People in the store said he would get sale flyers from Keyfood and never put them out, they sat in the boxes they came in. And everyone knew that we were getting another smaller grocer. CVS agreed to put aside some space to lease out to some kind of market as a concession to the neighborhood a long time ago, almost from the beginning of neighborhood meetings with CVS. And the prices there are good, the guy stays open til midnight and he sends out sale flyers every week.
He had free parking, and was right off the parkway, literally. The Broad street, Gramatan Ave exit on the Cross county Parkway is right across the street. He’s got no one to blame but himself.
The real reason why it closed is because they really tried to gut the community with their prices.I would by my brand of milk at the vegetable store for $.60 less. That’s the same price as A&P.When an elderly neighbor of mine said why are the prices so high the manager said we save you money on the bus,you should be grateful.She has ever since taken the bus to the Bronxville A&P.Then Harvest moon opened offering a steep discount to the things that Key foods sold.I stopped shopping there because of the prices.They had a few Keyfood Items that were inexpensive but not enough to keep me as a costumer.Now they want to gut the city of Mount Vernon because their plans backfired on them.I hope they loose.As far as the garage goes it isn’t the prettiest thing I’ve seenbut a dungeon it is not as it is an open garage.This guy is a real @#%@.
That store was a joke. It was VERY over-priced. I would rather drive to Cross County to Stop and Shop or to the south side. Hopefully, the new market next to CVS does well now.
Gizzo has a lot of nerve blaming the city. I shopped at Key food until they started to overcharge on the basics. I could never find the advertised sale items. The sales flyer would come out and that evening I’d go to Key Food and the item would not be there. When I asked the manager he would say” we didn’t get it yet”. What kind of nonsense is that. There were very few staffers who were helpful. The manager and some of the cashiers were a joke. The veggies were o.k. I stopped buying meat from there after the first month. And I use that open garage to go to Rite Aid, all the restaurants, the bank and so on. The community should sue him. Also, I went to his restaurant, again, gouged the customer.
The store was simply too expensive. The merchandise mix was not particularly well suited for the neighborhood either. Whether anyone could make a grocery store work in that particular third-rate business-killer location, I don’t know. But Gizzo’s formula wasn’t likely to work.