TOUR: Stop & Shop - Greendale, Worcester, MA

Stop & Shop

Opened: late 1990s

Owner: Ahold Delhaize

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: none

Location: 940 W Boylston St, Greendale, Worcester, MA

Photographed: December 7, 2018

It's time for our final store tour in the city of Worcester! It's been close to three months of nothing but Worcester, and up next we'll be moving on to the northern and eastern suburbs we haven't seen yet. Speaking of the suburbs, we're practically out of the city here -- under a mile from the city limits and a good five miles from downtown. (To, say, a midwesterner, that might not sound very far. But here in New England, everything's a little smaller and closer together, so we're practically out in the country here even though it's still within the Worcester city limits.)

The store is just under 70,000 square feet, and was built from the ground up in the late 1990s as a Stop & Shop. I would assume the store opened with this Super Stop & Shop decor, then was given the yellow and purple decor when the logo changed (see here).

The store is a very standard Super Stop & Shop setup. Produce is in the grand aisle, and in a setup typical in these 2017-era remodels, the former floral or natural foods department in the front corner here was used as an expansion of the produce department. Deli/prepared foods line the left side of the grand aisle. Seafood/meat and dairy are on the back wall, with the rest of dairy and frozen on the right side. Pharmacy and bakery are in the front right corner, with HABA in the grocery aisles extending from the pharmacy.

This was a decor package with some pretty solid potential, and some of the more extensively renovated or new-build stores looked good if still bland. But in renovations like this one, the stores feel really dull.

It is a good streamlined look, but it's kind of depressing in person. The stores (much like a newer decor package) feel dreary with so much gray and dim colors. Stop & Shop has had some real misfires as far as decor goes. I really like the "Taste & Table" decor (see here as an example) but the yellow and purple decor -- and its white and yellow and purple predecessor -- then this gray and wooden one, and the all-gray one I linked above are swings and misses. There's too much of the same color, and the stores feel cheap in renovations. To their credit, though, the later two decor packages have been much, much better. This one, which appears to be limited to the immediate New York City area, looks really good but still needs a slight modification to the colors (that wall color feels a little sickly but the signage is great). The newer one, which only appears in a handful of stores, hits the nail on the head, though, but I still want that weird green-gray to just be black. My favorite Stop & Shop decor package was in between the yellow and purple one and the gray ones, in its deluxe form of course. 

But this store looks really nice, and one of the best things to come out of this decor package is the green call-outs, which you can see in the signage below, for natural items under the Nature's Promise brand.

Cheese at the back of the grand aisle. It's a really good selection.

This store remodeled around the time the Price Chopper just around the corner became a Market 32 with an extensive remodel.

Obviously, that store is much more upscale than this Stop & Shop -- and also is higher volume, although it's slightly smaller. Stop & Shop definitely has a bigger selection of nonfoods/general merchandise and HABA, a holdover from the Super Stop & Shop days when the stores focused on those selections more than competitors.

The former "something special" alcove, where the butcher window probably was previously located, is now packaged meats. It looks like that may have been closed up when the butcher counter was moved over to where the seafood counter used to be. They are now combined, as you can see above.

Some more great Nature's Promise-specific branding in the aisles. I think this was the first decor package/store model style that didn't have a separate natural food department, so they probably wanted to make sure customers could still find the natural foods.

Dairy begins on the back wall and continues down the last aisle. I actually really like this style of signage, but it needs a little more flair to really work. Check out the deluxe version of this decor, as seen in Malden, for instance. I love that pattern!

One thing that really works about this round of remodels: the fixtures were all painted or replaced throughout the store, so there's a really good unified look.

Another good natural food call-out, although I'm "not sure" why we're using "quotation marks" to identify "Nature's Promise".

Bakery and pharmacy in the front corner.

Looking back up the frozen foods aisle.

In HABA, something interesting: totes from C&S with products ready to go out on the shelves. Ahold Delhaize announced in December 2019 that they would be transitioning from majority C&S-supplied to fully self-distributed for the Stop & Shop stores, so this was right at the end of C&S's tenure as S&S's main distributor.

I like the more open pharmacy setup, with the counter wrapping around the corner. You can see the exit/entrance at this end of the store to the right.

And a look across the front end, still feeling a lot like a Super Stop & Shop...

This is a nice store, but nowhere near reaching its potential -- that's what I feel in a lot of Stop & Shops. And the Market 32 around the corner clearly is living up to its potential (and Placer.ai estimates that, at about 6000 square feet smaller than this store, the Market 32 has about 1 1/2 times the foot traffic of this store). Well, that wraps up Worcester! We will be back to this area to see a few places in West Boylston -- the city line is about a mile north of here -- but for now, we're headed about four miles to the southeast for the group we'll be starting tomorrow.