TOUR: Stop & Shop - Grafton, MA

Stop & Shop
Opened: between 1997 and 2001

Previous Tenants: none
Location: 100 Worcester Rd, Grafton, MA
Photographed: May 9, 2021

It was the Grafton Flea Market, not the Stop & Shop, that drew me to town, but as long as we're here let's check out Grafton's only supermarket! (It's important to note that this is the Stop & Shop on Worcester Road in Grafton, not the Stop & Shop on Grafton Street in Worcester. We'll get there, don't worry.)

The roughly 60,000 square foot store dates back to the late 1990s, when it was a new-build store, though it replaced an older strip mall that was closer to the road (it appears to have been a department store, a supermarket, and a smaller business).

Today, the store is clean and pleasant, though not particularly memorable. It's a standard Super Stop & Shop layout, with the grand aisle on the right side. Natural foods are in the front right corner, with prepared foods and deli on the right side facing produce on the left side. Seafood and meat line the back wall with HABA, frozen, and dairy on the far left side. Bakery is in the front left corner. It doesn't look like this store ever had a pharmacy, but there's a CVS in an outparcel of this mall.

I really like the wood-texture flooring in the natural foods department. This is the nicest part of the store. The rest is very straightforward, and very familiar to anyone who knows Stop & Shop...

I like the tile backsplash on the seafood department!

This store seems to have a lower ceiling than others of a similar vintage, although the later Super Stop & Shops had much higher ceilings.

At 60,000 square feet, this feels large enough but not too large. Some of the massive stores Stop & Shop built in the early 2000s are way too big for them to even fill with merchandise.

Although Stop & Shop has been renovating many of their stores lately, I don't believe this or any of the stores within Worcester have gotten any remodels since the logo was changed in 2018. All of them still have some form of the "fruitbowl" or "fruit slice" decor -- and some have even older decor, which we'll see. By my count, if you look at all Stop & Shop stores in the immediate Framingham area and west, only four of the 33 locations have been remodeled since 2018. We'll see if the new strategy for the chain involves remodeling those locations or closing them -- or, as I suspect, a combination of both.

The meat department transitions to dairy on the left side of the back of the store.

Looking back in the other direction...

Frozen foods are in the last few aisles.

In a slightly unusual setup, dairy is exclusively on the back wall while the last two aisles are all frozen foods. It's more common to see the outside of the last aisle with dairy.

In the front of the store is the bakery department. It looks like Stop & Shop has cut most of the store-baked products, although some of the items are still baked in-store. But it seems to me a higher proportion of the baked goods come in from elsewhere compared to other chain supermarkets.

And looking across the front-end...

Notice another slight layout quirk, which is that packaged bread is in this area around the corner from bakery. Typically, this area would be the pharmacy, but this store doesn't have a pharmacy. Tomorrow we have something very different, a former grocery store in South Grafton!