This week in retail: Wegmans comes to Manhattan, Procter & Gamble reports earnings

We’re starting the week with a friendly reminder to figure out what you’re going to be for Halloween, because if you didn’t want to DIY your Taylor Swift–Travis Kelce couples costume, it’s too late—they’re apparently sold out on 3 Wishes, an online Halloween retailer.

But not to get too ahead of ourselves, let’s dive into what’s going on in retail this week.

In openings: Wegmans Food Markets will open its first Manhattan store on Wednesday, finally replacing the Astor Place Kmart that closed its doors in July 2021. It will be Wegmans’s second New York City location—an 87,500-square-foot space in the East Village employing 600+ workers.

• The grocer signed a 30-year lease in the historic Wanamaker building at 770 Broadway, whose tenants include Yahoo, Facebook, Nielsen, and Verizon.
• On top of offering prepared foods curated by chef David Lopatynski, Wegmans plans to open a dining space serving sushi and a champagne-oyster bar early next year.

Kmart operated at that location for 25 years before empty shelves and dissipating vendor relationships led to its closure. Michael Brown, partner in Kearney’s consumer products and retail practice, previously told Retail Brew after Kmart closed that Astor Place still had promise as a shopping destination.

• “Good space is good space,” Brown said. “If the concept lived [its] life expectancy, the traffic is still going to be there, so we just need to revive them.”

In e-commerce: Starting today, consumers in Chile can shop at Apple’s online store for the first time. Although the company has had a website in Chile, it hasn’t been able to sell its products there, and customers previously could only make purchases through Apple-approved third party vendors.

• Apple Pay went live in Chile in August.

In earnings: Procter & Gamble reports its earnings on Wednesday. The CPG heavyweight has had a strong year, thanks to increased prices. That was the story for its previous two quarters this year, when the company beat Wall Street expectations as consumers gravitated toward products like Crest toothpaste, Pampers diapers, Gillette razors, and Dawn dish soap, according to the New York Times and CNBC.