The Market Report

Shaw's Opened: unknown Owner:  Albertsons Companies Previous Tenants:  unknown Cooperative:  none Location:  45 Storey Ave, Newburyport, MA Photographed:  July 7, 2023 Newburyport is known for its scenic waterfront and quaint downtown on the Merrimack River, but The Market Report isn't in town for any of that! Instead, today we're to the northwest of downtown to visit the local Shaw's, one of two supermarkets in town. The other is a Market Basket literally next door to this one, which we'll take a quick look at tomorrow. A word of advice: if you come to Newburyport for one thing, make it the waterfront downtown, not the Shaw's. While there's certainly nothing wrong with this Shaw's, even I can't recommend it as a destination. It's nice, and newly renovated, but looks exactly like every other recently-renovated Shaw's out there. We enter to the grand aisle on the right side of the store, with produce in the front-right corner. Deli and prepa...

Tendercrop Farm Opened: 1995 Owner:  Matthew Kozazcki Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  108 High Rd, Newbury, MA Photographed:  July 7, 2023 A quick look today at another Tendercrop Farm, whose Wenham location we recently took a look inside. The Newbury location is the original Tendercrop, opening in 1995. Like Wenham, this is part greengrocer, part farmstand, part butcher, part greenhouse/garden center, and part working farm. Unfortunately, I don't have any interior pictures of this store, but you can see inside the produce barn here . (I was only driving by, unfortunately, and it was after the store had closed for the day when I took the above picture.) We're a couple miles outside Newburyport here, which is the larger town in this area on the Merrimack River. That's where tomorrow's store will be, so come back to check it out!

LIDL Opened: February 25, 2026 Owner:  Schwarz Group Previous Tenants:  Bed Bath & Beyond Cooperative:  none Location:  460 3rd Ave, Manhattan, NY Photographed:  February 27, 2026 Another new NYC LIDL! Like the Park Slope one, which opened recently, this new store in Manhattan's Kips Bay neighborhood (on the east side, slightly below Midtown East) is in a basement. The space was previously home to Bed Bath & Beyond, and now LIDL has claimed the approximately 21,000 square foot space as their own. As is true in Park Slope, only a foyer with escalators and an elevator is at street level. The rest of the supermarket is in the basement. And because it's a basement store, the space is, well, weird. Just like every other supermarket in New York City. So here's a fire exit plan, and I've added the basic department layout to give you an idea. (Ignore the arrows -- they're for the fire exit paths, not the shopping flow.) So we start with produce at the front, t...

Met Fresh Supermarket Opened:  February 20, 2026 Owner:  Danny Hamdan Previous Tenants:  Bohack > Rite Aid Cooperative:  Associated Supermarket Group Location:  7 Madison St, Manhattan, NY Photographed:  February 27, 2026 New York City has a lot of laws. But one that must be on the books somewhere, although I can't seem to find when City Council passed it, is that every time a drugstore closes in the city, it must be replaced by a supermarket. I've stopped even trying to keep count of how many new supermarkets have opened up in former drugstores, and in fact I'm running out of ways to introduce these posts because they've been so frequent (and yeah, we're really on the bottom of the barrel comedy material here. Bear with me, I'm tired). Okay, regaining focus here: what's not  bottom-of-the-barrel in any way is the stunning new Met Fresh Supermarket in Two Bridges, in far Lower Manhattan. And when I say far Lower Manhattan, I mean 1300 feet to the Ea...