After 11 years, Lansing Market to close doors

In 2011, a group of Lansing families got together and set out to fill a need in their growing community — a full-service, locally owned grocery store that came to be known as Lansing Market.

The market served as a cornerstone to the community for 11 years, but the ownership group of four families recently announced that the store will close Dec. 22.

The building, located at 3125 N. Triphammer Rd., is still owned by the families, and they are looking to lease the space to a new business.

“We feel bad for all the loyal customers we had, especially for the seniors who relied on us maintaining operation and having a full-line grocery store,” majority owner Andy Sciarabba said. “We feel bad that we can’t keep going on.”

Sciarabba said the higher cost of labor and goods and increased competition in the area made it infeasible to continue.

Since Lansing Market opened, an Aldi and a Tops have come to Lansing. Target, located inside The Shops at Ithaca Mall, has also started carrying full-line grocery services. Two Dollar Generals have opened (tinyurl.com/2edls3nx), as well as a Dollar Tree.

Sciarabba said within the first year and a half of opening, three of those competitors had come to Lansing.

Starting the store was not a way to get rich for the families involved, according to co-owner Eric Eisenhut.

“It was community driven,” he said. “The families that started this, we’re not grocery operators; we’re not restaurateurs; we’re not deli operators. We have accounting backgrounds, engineering backgrounds, some retail, but we’re not in the food space. … It’s an essential service that communities do well with. We didn’t want Lansing to be a place that’s anchored by dollar stores. I think that’s a sad outcome for a community to think that’s your option for basic food items.”

Still, after putting money into the business every year and not making a profit, the group looked at the economic landscape in Lansing and didn’t see things getting better.

“There’s a loyal customer base that’s going to miss it, but it’s not large enough. The reality is that there’s a broad offering of grocery choices within 5 miles, and it’s hard to change people’s buying habits,” Eisenhut said. “We’re not bitter; it was our choice to do this. It saddens us greatly that this is the outcome, but people who know what we did and why we did it are very supportive. It’ll be tough on everyone, but it’s time for the next chapter.”

Eisenhut said that once dollar stores started coming to Lansing, the store saw sales fall roughly 10%.

“The finances of it just don’t make sense to continue with the losses that continue to be generated,” he said. “We’ve always wanted a store here — we felt it was good for the community and it has been great for the community — but there’s just not enough support for it to continue to operate.”

He said one of the biggest challenges was having only one store location. When a staff member gets sick, there isn’t another store to pull labor from like at an Aldi or Tops.

Labor costs have also risen, especially since the pandemic started in 2020. Throughout the business’s life, increased competition has decreased volume, but supply chain issues have also plagued the store.

Eisenhut said that when items were in short supply, Lansing Market, being a single store, didn’t have the purchasing power of larger stores like Dollar General, BJ’s, Tops or Aldi.

He said in 2020, the store actually saw a rise in sales, but increased costs offset any profit the store could make.

“When you look out on the horizon, the competitive landscape is significant for grocery items,” he said. “A full-service, single-store operation really struggles when challenges arise on staffing, and that was one of the big issues we faced.”

Sciarabba said in one year, the store lost three managers. In some instances, managers or assistant managers had to leave because of illness.

Although the investors and employees are disappointed that the store is closing, Eisenhut said there are some great memories that have happened in the building that no “For Rent” sign will be able to take away.

“We have a very loyal group of people who work at the store, some who have been with us the whole time but many others like to work in the store because of its proximity to where they live, the flexible hours and it’s a caring group,” he said. “The time you spend in the store, you really see how close the work group is, so it’s hard to see that it’s being dismantled.”

There is still hope for the location. Sciarabba said that in addition to the building, most of the equipment will still be in the store and ready to use if someone wants to start a new store.

Although the group is open to other uses, he said the group would like to see it become another grocery store.

“Once we’re totally closed down, the equipment is going to be there for some time. [We’d like to] still find someone to come and make a bid to reopen the store. It may not be a full-line grocery store, but a modified version,” he said. “We’ll try to do that, but we can also repurpose the building for other uses like a medical or professional office, but we’d still like to see it become a grocery store.”

Eisenhut said that 11 years ago, there was a need for a grocery store, and he thinks the market served that purpose well for a portion of Lansing residents. Now, he’s ready to move on to the next chapter.

“It was a stretch early on,” he said. “The mindset we had was that it was good for the community and it would be an important part of a growing community, which Lansing is, but that growth and the impact on the store didn’t really materialize the way it needed to for the store to make sense.”

Lansing at Large appears every Wednesday in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@VizellaMedia.com.