The produce section is no more. The meats are long gone. Four aisles are shut down completely, and the rest hold only a random assortment of items.
With less than a week before it closes, the Shaw’s supermarket on Whalley Avenue is a shadow of its former self.
The store is scheduled to close its doors for good on Saturday at 5 p.m. The closing comes just a month and a half after parent company SuperValu announced it was pulling the grocery stores out of Connecticut. New Haven’s Shaw’s was one of only two in the state for which SuperValu couldn’t find a buyer.
Neighbors have been scrambling to attract another grocery store company to buy up the Shaw’s site — to no avail, so far. The closure of the store will leave over 100 workers without jobs and create an retail hole in the middle of the Dwight neighborhood.
A Monday afternoon visit to Shaw’s found aisles and aisles of mostly empty shelves.
The curtains are drawn on the produce, dairy, and meat sections. A handful of customers looked for bargains among a small selection of frozen foods left over.
What stock remains in the store has been pushed to the front of each aisle. It includes an assortment of non-perishable items, from canned soups to baby shampoo.
With nothing to put on the shelves, several aisles have been shut down completely.
“It’s like a ghost town,” said one Shaw’s employee.
