For 45 years, the supermarket at 1765 Peninsula Boulevard was where Hewlett bought its groceries. King Kullen ran the store for 45 years, until this past May, when the register lights went off for good and one of the busiest corners in the Five Towns went quiet. It will not stay quiet much longer. Savers, the thrift superstore chain that has been working its way across Long Island shopping centers for years, has leased the entire 26,895-square-foot supermarket space, and the brokerage that closed the deal says the new store is slated to open in the second quarter of 2027.

The whole corner, not just the supermarket

The lease covers more than the grocery floor. Savers also took the freestanding former Chase Bank building that sits on the same property, a separate structure with its own drive-through lanes. The company has not announced what the bank building will become, so for now the only official word is that plans for the second space are still being worked out.

Landlord Elias Properties, which owns the Peninsula Boulevard shopping center, had the space on the market through the summer. RIPCO Real Estate brokered the deal for Savers, the same pairing behind the chain's newest Long Island store, which opened October 1 in Carle Place.

What a Savers actually is

If you have never been inside one, picture a department store where everything had a previous owner. Savers, founded in San Francisco in 1954, buys donated clothing and household goods from local nonprofit partners, then sorts, prices and resells the merchandise across a sales floor the size of the supermarket it is replacing. The company now operates more than 370 stores, and its model has ridden the national secondhand boom hard: shoppers hunting bargains, parents outfitting kids who outgrow everything in a season, and a younger crowd that treats thrifting as sport.

The Hewlett store will be the chain's ninth on Long Island. Number eight just opened in Carle Place, a 33,648-square-foot store in the old Big Lots at Voice Road Plaza, where donations benefit Big Brothers Big Sisters of Long Island. Expect a similar nonprofit partnership in Hewlett; the company pays its partner organizations for the donated goods it receives, which turns every bag dropped at the store into funding for a local cause.

The supermarket that got away

There is a bittersweet wrinkle in the timing. King Kullen, founded in Queens in 1930 and widely recognized as America's first supermarket company, spent the past year finding its own next act. Giunta's Meat Farms completed its purchase of the chain this fall, and all 28 remaining King Kullen and Wild by Nature stores are staying open under the new ownership, a story this publication covered when the deal closed in early October.

The Hewlett store did not make it onto that lifeboat. It closed on May 21, months before the sale wrapped up. For the neighbors who pushed carts through its aisles for four and a half decades, the closing felt like losing a fixture. The consolation is that the building will not sit as a dead anchor dragging down the rest of the plaza. Within about a year of the supermarket going dark, the space has a signed tenant with a national name and an opening window.

What happens next

Savers will spend the coming months converting the space, a lighter lift than most supermarket conversions since a thrift superstore wants exactly what a grocery store leaves behind: wide open floor, high ceilings, loading docks and a big parking field. If the second quarter 2027 target holds, Hewlett shoppers will be back in the building around two years after they last walked out of it with grocery bags.

For the Five Towns, it is a different kind of anchor than the one that left. Nobody will buy milk there. But a 27,000-square-foot destination retailer draws steady traffic, and steady traffic is what keeps the smaller storefronts around it alive. The corner that fed Hewlett for 45 years is coming back to work.