The Market Report

Fitzgerald's General Store Opened: 1984 under current ownership; ca. 1850s previously; renamed 2024 Owner:  Roman Potty Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  110 Southville Rd, Southborough, MA Photographed: March 18, 2022 Fitzgerald's is quite the store! It's a general store dating back to around the 1850s , still going strong as a convenience store today. Fortunately and unfortunately, the roughly 3,000 square foot store has been recently renovated and is today Cordaville's Market . It's situated at the Southborough train station on the Framingham-Worcester line, which dates back to the 1830s, so it's likely this location was chosen even over 150 years ago because of its proximity to the train station. (In case you couldn't tell, I took the above picture from a train window.) That's a fun way to end our look at the route 9 area (although, of course, we're about a mile and a half south of route 9 itself here), and tomorrow we'

Roche Bros. Opened: 2007 Owner:  Michael Bozzuto Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  1100 Union St, Westborough, MA Photographed:  October 23, 2021 Welcome to our first Roche Brothers! The chain, based in a Boston suburb, operates 20 stores in eastern Massachusetts under the Roche Brothers, Sudbury Farms, and Brothers Marketplace banners. Their stores tend to lean upscale, with Roche Brothers generally being large, full supermarkets, Brothers Marketplace the smaller-format gourmet-focused locations, and Sudbury Farms in-between. At least I think so -- I've never actually been to a Sudbury Farms. We'll see a few of their stores, which tend to be really nice and impeccably-run. A side note here: as of earlier this month, the Roche family has sold majority ownership in the chain  to the owners of the Connecticut-based wholesaler Bozzuto's. At the time I visited this store (and the subsequent Roche Bros we'll see), they were still owned by the Roche famil

Stop & Shop Opened: between 1995 and 2001 Owner:  Ahold Delhaize Previous Tenants:  unknown Cooperative:  none Location:  32 Lyman St, Westborough, MA Photographed:  October 23, 2021 Stop & Shop has a very significant presence in its home state of Massachusetts, and even in many locations where they've closed, another store remains nearby. That's the case here in Westborough, where a location two miles west closed in 2021, leaving this one going strong. This one is a bit larger than the recently-closed one, measuring around 73,000 square feet all told. It's a second-generation Super Stop & Shop, placing its opening between 1995 and 2001. The first-generation so-called "octagonal" prototype doesn't remain on too many stores (are there still any octagonal Stop & Shops out there?), while this second-generation prototype is extremely common. It first appeared in roughly the late 90s, when it appears to have replaced the octagonal prototype. Stop

Original Grocery Tenant: Stop & Shop Address: 290 Turnpike Rd, Westborough, MA Opened:  1980s Closed:  2021 Later Tenants:  Amazon Fresh (planned, never opened) > Big Y (opening soon) Photographed:  October 23, 2021 Stop & Shop's struggles have been very well-publicized lately (and their misfortunes pile up -- after  recently closing 32 stores , they've been hit with a cyberattack that has left stores barren ), but they've closed quite a few stores in the last few years too, even before that more major announcement. One of the stores closed recently was this Westborough location -- a store of roughly 60,000 square feet built in the 1980s and then expanded and renovated in the late 1990s or so. This store was likely closed to drive traffic at their other location in Westborough, which is just about two miles east. This store was in a bit of an odd location, outside of the main town center area and close to a big, bustling Wegmans , not to mention a Target and