Bryant Park Whole Foods To Reopen After 4-Month Closure

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — The Whole Foods supermarket across the street from Bryant Park will reopen to shoppers this month, more than four months after it closed to the public and became a fulfillment center for online orders as the coronavirus pandemic took hold.

The supermarket will reopen Aug. 30, a Whole Foods spokesperson told Patch.

The Bryant Park location shut down to visitors in April as office workers emptied out of Midtown, and was repurposed to fulfill online orders from the surrounding neighborhood placed on Amazon Prime.

Five other Whole Foods markets across the country made the same switch, a Whole Foods spokesperson said. Two remain online-only, while the rest have already reopened or will do so soon.

Whole Foods opened its Bryant Park location in January 2017. The sprawling two-story, 43,000-square-foot store on 6th Avenue was one of the last Whole Foods locations to open in New York City before the company was acquired by Amazon.

In March, Whole Foods employees staged a "sick out" to protest unsafe working conditions in grocery stores and insufficient sick leave amid the coronavirus outbreak. A petition supporting the protest gained more than 12,000 signatures.

Whole Foods' response plan to COVID-19 included unlimited "call-outs" for staff unable to come to work, strict social distancing policies and increased hourly pay for part-time workers by $2 an hour. That hazard pay was discontinued in June.

Brendan Krisel contributed to this report.