This is the inside story of Fairway's slow, agonizing death. hannahhoward reports
Photo: JEENAH MOON/Bloomberg via Getty Images In many ways, Fairway’s Upper West Side store is a microcosm of the entire New York City experience: Bubbes threaten to plow you down with their shopping carts if you’re in their way. Lox maestros can cut translucent slices of smoked salmon at lightning speed. The maze-like layout seems intentionally designed to confuse shoppers who just want to race in for a box of cereal.
“The best-case scenario is that we get sold to some company and we get to keep our jobs,” an employee at one of the chain’s suburban stores told me. “But I don’t know if I am going to have a job in the next few weeks or months — nobody does — and that scares the crap out of me.” But some vendors, especially the small ones, are concerned that they won’t get paid. And employees are “swimming in a sea of fear,” one told me. In a notice to the State Labor Department, Fairway warned it may lay off up to 2,159 employees.
That changed, one corporate employee tells me, after two of the three original founders sold to Sterling Investment Partners, a private-equity company from Westport, Connecticut. “The beginning of the end started in 2007,” the employee says. “[Sterling] raped and pillaged the company.” They opened stores in “places they had no business opening,” and the urban idiosyncrasies didn’t quite translate in Stamford, Connecticut, or Nanuet, New York.
Fairway also faced very real challenges. The grocery business is notoriously cutthroat, and while Fairway had been the first to sell many specialty goods, those same products are now found at many other New York grocery stores. Fairway also faced increasingly tough competition as chains like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s expanded into the area, while online retailers like Fresh Direct gained traction.
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