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As Lord & Taylor enters Suffolk County tomorrow with two department stores opening simultaneously, the up- scale retailer also is planning improvements to its Nassau County locations.
Executives say sales remain strong at the Franklin Avenue store in Garden City, despite the exodus of other fancy department stores. And they hope more parking spaces will boost receipts at their first suburban unit in Manhasset.
Although it has been 42 years since Lord & Taylor opened a full-line location here, Long Island remains an important revenue source for the company that rang up sales of $1.9 billion last year, and as of this month will have 73 stores in 18 states and Washington, D.C.
"In retrospect, we should have had more stores more quickly," said Marshall Hilsberg, chief executive. "But . . . we had to wait for opportunities to develop so we could expand."
Both of the new Lord & Taylor stores, at Walt Whitman Mall in South Huntington and South Shore Mall in Bay Shore, are opening in complexes that have undergone multimillion-dollar renovations - their first since opening in the early 1960s. Each store is 120,000 square feet on two levels, and employs about 200 people.
At South Shore, Lord & Taylor's presence signals an effort by California developer Westfield Corp. to attract more affluent shoppers and to compete better against nearby strip plazas with big-box merchants, said Joel Evans, a Hofstra University professor. He also said...