Melissa Bailey Photo
Former Shaw’s worker Darious Goodman is back stocking shelves at his old haunt, as Dwight’s shuttered supermarket prepares to reopen in two weeks with a new name — and a 100 percent-local crew of employees.
Goodman (pictured), who lives nearby on Goffe Street, was one of 100 workers who lost their jobs when Shaw’s supermarket closed its doors one year ago, turning the greater Dwight area into a “food desert.”
After a year without steady employment, Goodman has returned to the supermarket to begin stocking the shelves of a new Stop & Shop.
The supermarket has hired 150 workers so far, all of them from New Haven, according to store manager Anne Demchak. Most of the workers are part-time.
Demchak shared that news on a tour of the store at 150 Whalley Ave., which buzzed with jackhammers, drills and the crackle of boxes being unpacked. The long-empty parking lot was packed full of workers’ vans.
The store is set to open April 15 at 6 a.m. It will be open seven days a week from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Goodman walked into the supermarket parking lot midday Thursday after his latest shift. He said he started last Wednesday putting merchandise back on the shelves. He plans to be stocking everything, “from baby diapers to lasagna.”
“I’m excited. I live close, and I’m one of the experienced grocery workers here.”
Inside the store Wednesday afternoon, one of Goodman’s coworkers sat down to get fingerprinted for her new job. A trio of young adults placed Dawn dish detergent on a shelf. A middle-aged man bent down with a roll of Bounty paper towels, reading a piece of paper to figure out the right spot.
The new workforce is drawn from the neighborhood, from social service agencies — and entirely from New Haven, Demchak said.
Demchak (at left in photo with Sheila Masterson and Cynthia Streeter), who’s 65, worked her way up the Stop & Shop chain after starting out as a bologna slicer 30 years ago. She managed the Amity store for nine years before taking on her current gig. A New Haven native from the Criscuolo family, she grew up on Oakley Street in the Annex and attended Fair Haven and Woodward schools before moving to East Haven. She sits on the board of the Connecticut Food Bank. When Shaw’s closed, she lobbied hard to get Stop & Shop to buy it — and to choose her as the manager.
When she took over Store #2633 in the abandoned Shaw’s plaza, she determined to make it a “community store.”
In choosing her new crew of stockers and checkout clerks, Demchak reached out to a range of local groups.
Her first priority, Demchak said, was to hire back people who had worked at Shaw’s and hadn’t found new employment — workers like Goodman.
Goodman said he had worked at Shaw’s for about nine months when the store closed. The 30-hour-a-week-job was his main source of income.
“I was upset,” he said. “I had just started working there.”
Over the last year, he did some occasional temp work in Hartford, but failed to find a steady job. Earlier this year, he heard that Stop & Shop was hiring. He applied, and got hired back.
Workers from Springfield, Mass.-based Agnoli Sign Company add the fruit bowl to the storefront sign Thursday.
After reaching out to Shaw’s workers, Demchak hit the social service agencies in the Dwight area. She hired five people from Fellowship Place, a facility for adults recovering from severe mental illness that’s just down the street. She hired five each from Chapel Haven and Marrakech and two through Easter Seals/ Goodwill.
Her next step was to seek out people who had looked for work through the job centers at New Haven libraries and through JUNTA for Progressive Action. She made more hires from the APT Foundation, which helps ex-cons reenter society, and the Youth Development Group.
Then Demchak opened up hiring to the general public. Her staff interviewed 800 people in the course of two days, then shut off the flow of job-seekers. So far, they’ve received 3,000 applications online.
Demchak said she ended up hiring 150 people.
“Everybody we hired is from New Haven,” Demchak said. “There’s enough out-of-work people in New Haven,” she explained, that there was no need to look outside city lines.
All the new hires go through a four-hour orientation, which covers topics like handling spills and sexual harassment. Then they go out to other Stop & Shop stores for training. New cashiers shadow an experienced worker, then start ringing up customers themselves once they’re comfortable.
The group of hires includes eight or nine youths, Demchak said.
As Demchak spoke Wednesday in an upstairs meeting room, two workers came up to heat up their lunches in a microwave. Another came to get fingerprinted for a background check. Most of the workers were out getting trained in other stores, Demchak said.
A worker for Setronics, Inc. installs a surveillance camera.
Meanwhile, about 50 contractors set to work installing industrial-size freezers and an island for the salad bar. Demchak led a small group on a tour through the action. The tour-takers included three members of the so-called Dwight-Edgewood-West River Promise Neighborhood Planning Team Executive Committee, which held a get-to-know-you meeting on the second floor of the supermarket Wednesday afternoon. The group is run by Linda Townsend-Maier, executive director of the Greater Dwight Development Corporation, which owns the plaza and negotiated the deal to move Stop & Shop move into the space.
Demchak led the group past the site of the new People’s Bank, self-checkout lanes and a sushi counter. Some shelves were already stocked with Stop & Shop brand sea salt rice cakes; others held Fruit Gushers and Advil. Demchak pointed to the spot that will become a kosher bakery and a kosher cold-cut section.
“When you put kosher, can you write halal?” asked Dixwell activist Cordelia Thorpe. She suggested it would be “friendly wording” for Muslims in the area.
The tour ended in the dairy section, which is equipped with roller-blinds in case of a loss of refrigeration.
“This is so nice, Anne,” gushed Townsend-Maier. “I am so in love!”
West River’s Stacy Spell and Stop & Shop’s Kate Walton.
In effort to be a good community partner, the store will pilot a nutrition program this summer with the New Haven libraries, announced Kate Walton (pictured), a part-time associate in charge of the initiative. The program will be an extension of one that Stop & Shop tried out last year at the Wexler-Grant school, she said. There will be a combination of workshops on nutrition, light snacks, “robust” snacks for kids who spend several hours in the library in the summer and may not get dinner at home that night.
“We are a for-profit business,” Demchak explained, “but I am also a non-profit person and a community supporter.”