TOUR: Market Basket - Fitchburg (John Fitch), MA

Market Basket

Opened: early 1970s

Owner: DeMoulas family

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: none

Location: 399 John Fitch Hwy, Fitchburg, MA

Photographed: April 7, 2023

Ah, Market Basket. How New Englanders love thee. And one of Market Basket's strengths is consistency -- no matter how old the stores are, they all look basically the same and they're maintained exceptionally well. Plus, the majority of the stores have been opened, rebuilt, or expanded within the last 20 years or so. They have an incredibly consistent store fleet for a chain of around 100 supermarkets (and counting). So today's tour is something highly unusual: a Market Basket that hasn't been touched much since its opening in the early 1970s. It's received a small expansion, no later than 1985, out the right side (and in fact, you can just barely make out a slight difference in the tones of brick on the right in the below picture). Today, it's a little shy of 40,000 square feet -- very, very small for a Market Basket. I'm also fairly confident the neon sign out front is original.

Obviously, this store is much older and a little dingier than the newer store in downtown Fitchburg. Still, it basically looks the same, except for the layout which is reversed. So dairy is on the left side, with deli at the back, meats on the back wall, and produce and frozen on the left side. I don't recall seeing a service seafood or bakery department. No Market Baskets have pharmacies, although most have a large HABA department.

I joked on the Leominster Market Basket post that the single light burnt out there was the only one burnt out in the whole chain. Well, I guess we can add two more to that list. I don't know what has stopped this store from expanding or moving -- there was, until recently, a mostly-vacant strip mall directly across the street (it's now a self-storage facility). You could easily build a store more than double the size of this one in the space CubeSmart now occupies.

But in the grocery aisles, this store doesn't look that different from, say, Shrewsbury, which opened in 2021. Just slight differences in the shelving and lighting.

You can feel that this store is smaller, though, especially in certain aisles like the HABA department here. Would two carts even fit next to each other here?

Frozen foods, produce, and floral on the left side...

Alright, so this store actually has quite a few lights burnt out. I have to imagine Market Basket is working on plans to replace it, since this is so obviously out of line of what they tend to operate. The Shrewsbury location is over 85,000 square feet, but their stores reach nearly 140,000 square feet.

And a look at the front-end, complete with the famous retro clock that's in all the locations.

I can think of at least one other very small and old Market Basket -- the one in Somerville, MA, right outside Boston -- which we'll be seeing when we get to that area. Does anyone know of others? Most that I've been to have been 90s or later. As I mentioned, Fitchburg only has two Market Baskets and no other supermarkets, but there's another store right outside of town (about a mile and a quarter east of here) in Lunenburg, where we're off to tomorrow!