Burlington is set to open a location in Farmingville, Long Island, in a stride towards the retailer’s plans to double its store count.
The off-price retailer is opening a store in the Suffolk County hamlet on Nov. 12, Newsday reports. It will be the retailer’s eighth Long Island location and include 32,000 square feet, part of the company’s initiative to reduce the size of its stores.
“During the spring [2021] season, we opened 16 stores that were 30,000 square feet or less and the earlier results are extremely encouraging,” Burlington CEO Michael O’Sullivan said in a second-quarter earnings call, according to Newsday.
The company has cut the average size of its stores from 43,000 square feet in the 2018 fiscal year to 40,000 square feet in 2020, according to Newsday.
The new Burlington location in the Expressway Plaza at 2280 North Ocean Avenue is taking up about a third of a 103,000-square-foot former Kmart store that closed two years ago. It is joined in the Expressway Plaza by a Stop & Shop supermarket, TGI Friday’s, Starbucks and LA Fitness.
The company, formerly known as the Burlington Coat Factory, operates almost 800 stores across 45 states and Puerto Rico, as of the end of July. However, the discount retailer has plans to grow much bigger.
In March, the retailer announced a long-term strategy to increase its total store count to 2,000 locations, planning to open 100 stores during the current fiscal year. The smaller footprint of its stores was part of the plan for the company’s expansion.
“This new target takes account of the significant market share opportunity that we see ahead of us, and of the improvements we are making in our business with Burlington 2.0, in particular the significant reduction in inventory levels and the smaller store footprint that this enables,” O’Sullivan said in a statement to Chain Store Age.
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[Newsday] — Holden Walter-Warner