TOUR: Shaw's - Webster Square, Worcester, MA

Shaw's
Opened: 2005

Previous Tenants: Zayre
Location: 68 Stafford St, Webster Square, Worcester, MA
Photographed: November 9, 2018; March 17, 2019; September 17, 2019; October 15, 2019; March 19, 2021; December 3, 2021; December 8, 2021; January 17, 2022; January 30, 2022; January 20, 2023; and November 18, 2023

Is it excessive to photograph the same supermarket 11 times?

Well...

Maybe.

Maybe not.

The Shaw's at Webster Square Plaza eventually became my go-to store when I lived in Main South, so I must've photographed every little change I saw over the years. The store was built around the 1950s as a department store, which I believe was Zayre (and maybe later Ames?). You can actually check out the store as a Zayre here. There were actually once two supermarkets in the Webster Square Plaza. A&P was one, opening around 1960 and closing around the mid-1970s. Also opening around 1960 was Elm Farms Food, a chain I know very little about, then Hodes in the same spot by the late 50s, then Iandoli by 1973. In 1987, Shaw's acquired Iandoli, and in 2005, Shaw's constructed their new location across the mall in the former department store, the second LEED-certified supermarket in the US. Today, the former Shaw's has been divided with Marshalls taking the larger spot.

The store clocks in at a massive 80,000 square feet, and it's on the big side. There's a few areas that have too much space, but it's still a pretty nice store. As far as I can tell, it looks like this store has yet to be renovated to the current Shaw's decor. The decor we see here actually predates all of the Premium Fresh & Healthy decor packages, meaning that this store actually hasn't really been renovated since it opened. It's only a few years newer than the Price Chopper at Main and Cambridge, but to me it feels much newer.

We enter to the grand aisle on the right side, with floral in the front, produce in the front part, deli and bakery in the back right corner, and seafood at the back of the grand aisle. Meat lines the back wall. The first few aisles had an international foods department and a natural foods department in the front, but I believe they've been removed in a fall 2023 reset.

Most of these pictures come from my first round of pictures in 2018.

The deli and bakery departments line the right side of the back half of the grand aisle. Because the store is very deep -- it's actually deeper than it is wide -- the aisles are divided with a center aisle.

The store has a polished concrete floor. It looks like it was stained or painted in the grand aisle, which is not uncommon in Shaw's stores of this vintage. I can't fully tell whether the Shaw's is in the former Zayre building, as its footprint looks slightly larger than the original building.

There's no service butcher, but there's a small meat window next to the seafood counter.

We can tell the store is a little too big based on the really wide aisles and several are double-wide. In the fall 2023 reset, they actually moved some of the aisles. I believe they made them wider and more consistent.

Here's a look across the middle of the store towards dairy and HABA on the left side. In the last few aisles, the back half are frozen and dairy, and the front half are HABA. In the first few aisles, the front half is (or was -- I believe they've changed this layout by now) divided between an international section and a natural foods section.

Here's the pass-through between the grocery aisles and the grand aisle, where you can see the deli counter.

Shop the World is the international section, taking up three aisles but only for a short distance. You can see the darker brown flooring towards the front, which is where the natural foods department is (or was).

This is a department Albertsons seems to be consistently removing from stores as they're remodeled and reset (see here or here, for instance), and they integrate the natural foods in with the rest of the grocery items.

I really liked these sections, although I understand the reasoning behind integrating everything.

Here's a look at the back-right corner of the store, where meat, seafood, and bakery are.

And in the other direction...

Here's another example of an extra-wide aisle. Even so, you can see that the store is very well-stocked and they don't seem to have any trouble filling the store.

Milk with some very, um, understated signage in the back left corner.

I actually like this decor package quite a bit, and I think it's held up well over time. It doesn't particularly look dated.

Certain fixtures have been updated, such as these freezers, although it looks like it might be refurbished older freezers.

The Wellbeing section is in the front, with three or four aisles of HABA in front of dairy and frozen.

I will never understand this sign. Obviously, this used to say ricotta sour cream, as in two items available under the sign, but somebody must have moved the "our cream" closer to the "ricotta" after the s fell off. There's no possible way that the sign had that spacing when it was installed. So strange.

Anyway, dairy lines the outside of the last aisle, with frozen foods on the inside.

I really like this signage and merchandising, too. The deep blue wall and the white floor make for a very striking combination.

And a look at the expansive front-end.

There's no pharmacy here, but there is a massive open space in this corner. I'm not sure if there was previously something else here (a coffee shop? A bank branch?) but it's now used for Drive Up & Go, along with seasonal items and the random other odd use (sometimes it's an early voting site, and yes, they actually set up the typical ballot tables with the privacy screens right here in the corner of the supermarket).

This store does have some branding issues, though, since all the baskets for a while said Safeway...

...and the reusable bags said Star Market, Shaw's cousin to the east.

For a while, a very intense wind storm knocked out part of the h in the main sign. It was fixed after a few weeks.

I noticed the first signs of a renovation one night walking to the store and noticing these out back (clearly visible from Stafford Street, where I would walk in from). Unfortunately, the work was rather minor.

But a big improvement! New lighting was installed all around the store in 2021 or so, and while not particularly exciting, it was a much-needed upgrade. You can see the comparison to the older lighting here.

And for a particularly dramatic comparison, here's the view down one aisle. You see that intense bright section at the back? That's the new lighting, which is now across the whole store. (Obviously, the perspective of the image makes those lights look closer together, but still, it's very bright.)

Also at the time, the front corner was switched to the Drive Up & Go section, and several self-checkouts were added to that corner as well.

Oddly, a while after that, this sign appeared at the entrance (I saw it in early 2023) and then it quickly disappeared with no visible work done. By the fall of 2023, there was once again work going on in this store...

...and that involved a reset and moving the aisles as I mentioned before. It also included adding this very, very large refrigerator of single-serve beverages in the soda department, probably bigger than anything I've seen in any other supermarket. There's no beer or wine sold here, so this is all soda, water, juice, tea, and the like.

It does look like they were trying to reduce the large empty spaces in certain parts of the store by spreading everything out a little more, with things like that refrigerator and wider aisles but no more double-width aisles. I am not positive whether any aisles were removed for good. You can see, though, that the changes resulted in the aisle markers being just a little off.

That's all for this Shaw's, but Worcester has a second one up towards Indian Lake that we'll see in a little while. In the meantime, we'll see a small independent store down the street tomorrow!