Big Y World Class Market
Owner: D'Amour family
And it's time for our first Big Y tour here in Massachusetts! Big Y is a family-owned chain based in Springfield of around 75 stores. It dates back to 1936, when Charles D'Amour opened the Y Cash Market at a y-intersection in Chicopee. This store was a new-build in 2011, and it seems to have been renovated fairly recently before I visited.
The store has a layout pretty similar to most Big Y stores. They have stores across Massachusetts and Connecticut and cover a pretty wide geographic area, stretching from basically Boston suburbs in the northeast to Bridgeport suburbs in the southwest. Their home base and strongest area is in the Springfield and western Massachusetts area.
This is a variation on the latest Big Y decor package, which as you might notice is not that different from the Inserra decor, for instance. That's because Broden Design Group was responsible for the design of this store and also the Inserra locations.
We enter to the grand aisle on the right side, with produce in the front right corner, bakery on the right side wall, and prepared foods and seafood at the back. Meats are on the back wall with dairy and frozen on the left side, and deli and cheese in the front left corner.
It's a bit odd (and unusual for Big Y, as far as I know) to have the prepared foods and deli sections so far apart.
I like the flooring throughout the store.
The store appears to be around 44,000 square feet.
Over the years I lived in Massachusetts, I saw Big Y move from a solid but very expensive and slightly quirky (not in a good way) local chain to a very strong, well-priced, and well-run small regional chain. Among the changes was eliminating the Big Y brand in favor of Food Club from TopCo, along with Full Circle, TopCare, Culinary Tours, and the other TopCo brands.
It doesn't look like any of the fixtures have been replaced since the store opened, but to be fair, that wasn't that long ago.
The store is clean and orderly. It looks like this would be a real pleasure to shop in. In fact, it might have even put the nearby Price Chopper out of business -- although that store was so small and old, it was bound to close eventually, and there was a gap of about 6 years between this store's opening and the Price Chopper's closure.
The cheese department's setup, in the front corner between deli and dairy, is a bit unconventional but it works and makes sense.
I'm not sure I'm aware of other Big Y stores where the deli is in this corner, but here it's between customer service and the front-end. Pharmacy is at the other end of the front wall, near the entrance.
I was here at the end of the day (around 8 pm), explaining the empty store. By all indications, this store seems high-volume -- and with the Price Chopper closed, the next closest store is an independent called Loeb's Foodtown (no relation to the NYC-area Foodtown) five miles north in Lenox. There's also a Market 32 a little farther north, also in Lenox, and a Price Chopper about 8 miles south as the crow flies in Great Barrington.
Owner: D'Amour family
Opened: November 3, 2011
Previous Tenants: none
Location: 10 Pleasant St, Lee, MA
Photographed: June 10, 2022
We'll see a few more Big Y stores as we pass through Massachusetts, but for now, it's over and out but we'll see another one tomorrow!
Comments
Post a Comment