Retail Roundup: AT&T store coming to Melville Mall
The construction site where a small retail building is being built at Melville Mall, a shopping center on Route 110/Walt Whitman Road, seen on April 25. Credit: Newsday/Steve Pfost
AT&T’s addition of 1,000 new stores nationwide will include a location at Melville Mall this year.
An AT&T Store will be one of the new tenants in a 15,000-square-foot building being constructed at the shopping center on Walt Whitman Road/Route 110, said Wendy Pierce, spokeswoman for Federal Realty Investment Trust, the Rockville, Maryland-based owner of the shopping center.
The other new tenants have not been named yet, she said.
Melville Mall’s existing building is about 250,000 square feet and its tenants include off-price department stores Macy’s Backstage and Marshalls, grocer Uncle Giuseppe’s Marketplace and Dick’s Sporting Goods.
The AT&T Store, which will occupy about 2,500 square feet of the new building, will open in the fourth quarter of this year and sell cellphones, as well as wireless and DirecTV services, said Kate MacKinnon, spokeswoman for Dallas-based AT&T Inc.
In September, AT&T announced that it planned to open 1,000 new stores, including pop-up locations, giving it “one of the fastest-growing retail footprints in the nation.” It's on track to hit that number by the end of 2019, the company said recently.
“We’re working to make our customer interactions more convenient and seamless,” said Rasesh Patel, a senior executive vice president of AT&T , in a statement in September.
There are about 5,300 AT&T stores nationwide operated by the company or authorized dealers, MacKinnon said.
On Long Island, 20 are operated by AT&T and 54 are run by authorized dealers, she said. AT&T will operate the Melville Mall store.
Retail Roundup is a column about major retail news on Long Island — store openings, closings, expansions, acquisitions, etc. — that is published online and in the Monday paper. To read more of these columns, click here. If you have news to share, please send an email to Newsday reporter Tory N. Parrish at tory.parrish@newsday.com.
Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.
Power bills may increase ... What's up on LI ... Plays of the week ... Get the latest news and more great videos at NewsdayTV
