A big empty supermarket is one of the more depressing things a shopping center can have. It is a dark box with a parking lot in front of it, and it tends to take the rest of the plaza's traffic down with it.

Wheatley Plaza in Greenvale is about to stop having one. Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace has set August 14 as the opening date for its store at 130 Wheatley Plaza, in the space that most recently held a Stop & Shop, with a ribbon cutting scheduled for 11 a.m.

The company says the store will employ roughly 250 people.

Why this particular corner matters

Greenvale is a small hamlet doing outsized work. It sits at the junction where Glen Cove Road meets Northern Boulevard, which makes Wheatley Plaza a practical stop for households in Roslyn, Old Westbury, Brookville, Glen Cove, Oyster Bay, Locust Valley and a good deal of the surrounding North Shore. Uncle Giuseppe's lists all of those communities as the store's service area, which is a polite way of saying the trade area is considerably larger than the hamlet.

An anchor grocery store is the single biggest generator of repeat foot traffic a plaza can have. People come weekly, and while they are there they use the other tenants. That is the arithmetic behind the relief that a vacant anchor is being filled rather than subdivided.

What Uncle Giuseppe's is

The chain is a Long Island product. It runs on the old-world Italian market format: a full service deli, butcher counter, seafood case, bakery, and a prepared foods operation that is closer to a restaurant kitchen than a supermarket hot bar. The prepared foods department is the real draw, and it is why the stores tend to be busy at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday rather than only on Saturday mornings.

Greenvale will be the company's thirteenth location across New York and New Jersey.

The hiring, in detail

Two hundred and fifty jobs at one site is a meaningful number in Nassau County retail, and the openings are spread across the whole store rather than concentrated in cashiering. The company lists positions in deli, meat, seafood, bakery, prepared foods, produce, grocery, cashiering, customer service and management.

The compensation details worth knowing:

Select positions pay more than entry-level retail. The company has said experienced deli specialists can earn up to $25 an hour depending on experience and qualifications, which reflects that a full service deli counter is a skilled job and staffing one is the hardest part of opening a store like this.

Benefits include a 401(k) with a company match for eligible employees and a 25 percent employee discount on purchases. Full-time employees who started before August 1 were offered a $500 retention bonus payable at six months.

Hiring has been running out of an on-site trailer at the Greenvale location, with walk-in interviews Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Applications also go through uncleg.com/greenvale.

Chief Executive Carl DelPrete, in announcing the opening date, said, "Our team members are the heart and soul of every Uncle Giuseppe's."

The bigger hiring picture

Greenvale's 250 positions are part of a company plan to hire roughly 1,000 people over the next twelve months across its locations.

That is worth sitting with for a second in the context of the region's job numbers. Long Island's private sector job growth over the past year has been concentrated heavily in health care and social assistance, with retail and food service comparatively flat. A single specialty grocery operator adding a thousand positions across a two-state footprint does not reverse that pattern, but it is a real counterexample to the assumption that grocery retail on Long Island only contracts.

What to expect on August 14

Opening days at stores like this are busy in a way that is either fun or unbearable depending on your temperament. The ribbon cutting is at 11 a.m., which means the parking lot will be at its worst between roughly 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.

If you are going for groceries rather than for the event, the first weekday afternoon after opening week is the calmer play. If you are going for the spectacle, that is what an 11 a.m. ribbon cutting is for.

Either way, Wheatley Plaza gets its anchor back.