This site was then far uptown from the central shopping area, but close to housewives who walked or rode in private carriages to the store.

In Manhattan, Gristede Brothers remained concentrated on the more affluent East Side, where it specialized in personal service and gourmet items and charged premium prices.

It shipped items to customers around the world, including, for example, a Greek who wanted melons sent to him in Paris by air freight.

Southland retained the prior Gristede Brothers management and for more than a decade left the chain to its own devices.

By the early 1980s, however, Gristede's, as well as other supermarket chains with outlets in New York City, was reeling from a number of adverse conditions, including the small size of the stores, the high cost of delivery in the city, escalating rents, and competition from gourmet shops and specialty food stores.

Red Apple, owned by John A. Catsimatidis and operating in the Bronx as well as Manhattan, now became the largest supermarket chain in New York City.

Red Apple had completed 14 Gristede's remodels by the fall of 1987, including adding in-store delicatessens, bakeries, salad bars, hot takeout foods, and upscale cheese, prime-meat, and seafood sections.

Born in the Bronx and reared by foster families after his mother died, Max Sloan left school after the eighth grade to sell fruit and vegetables from a pushcart.

Sloan and his partner, Lou Meyer, also ran a wholesale produce operation supplying fruits and vegetables to many grocery stores in Manhattan and the Bronx.

The city's consumer affairs agency[citation needed] had consistently listed Sloan's as one of the most expensive food chains in Manhattan.

Cynthia Rigg of Crain's New York Business[citation needed] wrote, "Over the past decade Sloan's reputation for quality has fallen dramatically.

The privately held chain has done little to upgrade its stores while [its competitors] have undertaken extensive expansion and modernization programs."

The acquisition had its hazards, however, because three of Sloan's owners were, in 1993, being charged with fraudulently redeeming at least $3.5 million of discount coupons clipped from newspapers,[citation needed] an action that threatened 15 of the acquired units with forfeiture to the federal government.

This purchase was not assigned to Red Apple itself but to Designcraft, Inc., a publicly owned shell corporation whose main stockholder was Catsimatidis.

In 1994 the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint,[citation needed] seeking the sale of ten Red Apple-controlled stores in four Manhattan neighborhoods because of possible anticompetitive effects, such as higher food prices and lower quality and selection.

Supermarkets under the Red Apple, Gristede's, and Sloan's names were serving 37 percent of Manhattan's food shoppers on a regular basis, according to a survey.

The Red Apple name virtually disappeared during this period, its outlets sold to Rite Aid Corporation or converted to Gristede's or Sloan's supermarkets.

[citation needed] Gristede's gave shoppers free copies (as many as 5,000 in all) of a specially printed version of the paper, which had a full-page ad for the store on the front and back.

In 2002, A&P (The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company) sold Gristede's three Food Emporium stores for $5.5 million.

Gristede's was bidding against rival D'Agostino Supermarkets, Inc. to acquire Parsippany, New Jersey–based Kings Super Markets from Marks & Spencer PLC (M&S).

According to the New York Times,[citation needed] Catsimatidis was encouraged to open a supermarket in a Latino neighborhood there following the success of a store in the Washington Heights area.

According to him, intense new regulations and the difficulty of creating investor interest for a small company (valued at $16 million) were behind the move.

At one time Gristedes also had a store in the Village of Port Chester, New York, and was located on Poningo Street, it was closed c.1970.