Special Report: Stop & Shop (closing)

Special Report: Stop & Shop (closing) - Ansonia, CT

Stop & Shop
Opened: ca. late 1980s

Owner: Ahold Delhaize

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: none

Location: 100 Division St, Ansonia, CT

Photographed: August 18, 2024

Closing Date: October 31, 2024

Another Sunday, another day to look at closing Stop & Shops! (You can see the past posts in this series here.) We're up in Ansonia, CT, a small city between New Haven and Bridgeport about ten miles inland from the coastline. This Stop & Shop was built in the late 1980s or very early 1990s (it was finished and open by 1991) and spans around 62,000 square feet. It's just outside downtown Ansonia, and while the city doesn't have another supermarket -- it has a Target downtown -- but there's a ShopRite and an ALDI essentially across the street in Derby. A Big Y in downtown Ansonia moved out to Derby about two and a quarter miles southeast in late 2019.

The store was most recently renovated around 2010 with the earlier version of the yellow and purple decor (later versions had yellow/beige walls). It hasn't been expanded since it opened, but it looks like that renovation was pretty extensive.

I visited the store on a quiet Sunday morning around 11:00, and it was pretty slow customer-wise. CT Insider reports that as of earlier this month, the "parking lots and shelves [were] empty".

The store is pretty nice, though, and if a new operator wanted to take it over, it would mostly need cosmetic work as the space feels up-to-date enough. But I don't expect this to quickly become another supermarket -- the vacant Big Y around the corner has stayed empty since they moved out in 2019.

It's a standard Super Stop & Shop layout with the grand aisle on the left side. Floral and natural foods are in the front-left corner, with prepared foods and deli on the rest of the left side wall and produce opposite. Seafood, meat, and dairy are on the back wall, with frozen foods on the right side. Bakery and pharmacy are in the front-right corner.

Interesting that this store had a service seafood department right up until the end. So many stores have closed theirs.

Here's a look across the back wall. You can see they've kept the store up nicely, and it's very clean even at the end.

And the grocery aisles were well-stocked in some places...

...but not in others. I think they started to thin out the stock in early August in these closing stores, and it's gotten lower since. This store, like the majority of the Stop & Shops closing, is slated to close on October 31.

The only place that this decor package doesn't really work is in these areas of lower ceilings where there's no lighting on the signage. This sign would be a lot more appealing -- if still not beautiful -- if it were lit nicely.

Dairy is on the back wall, as is common in these very wide stores.

Even as of my visit in mid-August, several aisles had been emptied and closed off, specifically nonfoods and HABA.

In addition to the closed aisles, several of the open aisles also were pretty empty. The HABA stock seemed to have been sent to other locations as I am not aware of any discounts on the items.

Here's a look at some more aisles closed, here with bottled water and a bread rack.

Meanwhile, the remaining HABA and nonfoods stock had been condensed down to a small section in one aisle.

It's clear the frozen foods cases aren't that old. Possibly because the store is in solid shape, it could be appealing to a new operator (but who?). The Big Y nearby seemed to be in pretty good shape, too, so if that's not of interest maybe this one won't be either.