The Market Report

Original Grocery Tenant: A&P Address: 256 Cambridge St, Burlington, MA Opened:  ca. 1960s Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  assorted non-grocery tenants Photographed:  May 16, 2024 I'm sure everybody here already knows what this store was originally. This store of around 14,000 square feet was built in the early 1960s, apparently opening between 1963 and 1965, although I don't know when it closed. And for those who don't know, this store was originally a location of A&P, once the country's largest supermarket chain, built in a style called Centennial (given that the stores were a special design to celebrate the chain's 100th anniversary in 1959). There are more than a few stores of that model still operating as supermarkets across the country , and some were even still A&P locations right up until the chain's 2015 bankruptcy. This one is a bit unusual because the building is actually more of a parallelogram than a rectangle, as the front and back w...

McKinnon's Supermarket Opened: 2022 Owner:  Carl and Ed Penta Previous Tenants:  Lucci's Supermarket (1956-2022) Cooperative:  none Location:  211 Lowell St, Wilmington, MA Photographed:  July 8, 2023 Here in Wilmington, a longtime independent supermarket was recently taken over by a local chain. Lucci's Supermarket first opened in Wilmington in 1956, but in 2022, the 20,000 square foot store was sold to McKinnon's Supermarkets , a chain of five stores in northeastern MA and southern NH. It still has an old-school feel, but it's been nicely fixed up. Lucci's appears to have done a renovation shortly before selling the store. Produce and some frozen are in the first aisle on the left side, which is labeled aisle 10. Additional frozen and packaged meat line the back wall, and the rest of the perimeter departments are in an expansion in the back-right corner, with the rest of meat, deli, prepared foods, and bakery in that corner. Dairy lines the right side wall of...

  Welcome to the middle of Middlesex! We're north of Framingham but south of Lowell, where we recently spent some time. Because we finished up in North Billerica in the northeastern part of the county with the last group, we're going to start on the eastern side of this group, moving from eastern central Middlesex County (Wilmington and Burlington), then doing a little zig-zag through Acton and Concord (yes, that Concord ), and finally finishing up in Maynard, Stow, and Hudson to the southwest of that area. This is a very suburban area, almost bordering on rural in parts, despite its proximity to bigger cities. Relatively large expanses of forest (for eastern Massachusetts, of course) and other natural areas separate this region from the bigger cities, and these are all small towns. Another landmark of note in this area is the Hanscom Air Force Base just outside Burlington. It actually has its own supermarket, the Hanscom Commissary , which being a military facility I don'...

Market Basket Opened: ca. 1990 in current location; ca. 1960 in previous location in strip mall Owner:  DeMoulas family Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  199 Boston Rd, North Billerica, MA Photographed:  July 8, 2023 Welcome to another Market Basket! Yesterday I posted a small former A&P across the street which was built in the 1950s, and the following decade, this strip mall was constructed with a roughly 20,000 square foot Market Basket. By 1995, Market Basket had built a new store at the opposite end of the strip mall, which is the one that's now in business. It's around 50,000 square feet. There's a very important note I must make here: the town we're in is North Billerica (which is, of course, just north of Billerica). And that's pronounced bill-RICK-uh, not bill-ER-i-ca as you'd assume. At least it's not as bad as Woburn, ten miles south, which is pronounced WOO-bin. Inside, it will not surprise anyone that it looks exactly li...

Original Grocery Tenant: A&P Address: 200 Boston Rd, North Billerica, MA Opened:  ca. 1950s Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  assorted non-grocery tenants Photographed:  July 8, 2023 It's been extensively disguised, but yes, that's a former A&P Centennial store behind the O'Reilly Auto Parts sign. My best guess is that this store opened in the 1950s before the centennial era as a 10,000 square foot standard A&P, then was converted fairly simply to a centennial store around 1960. It had the centennial facade by 1963, but it doesn't have any other obvious centennial design elements, making me think it wasn't built as one. I see similarities instead to a store like this . It was expanded with an additional 5000 square feet on the left side between 1978 and 1981, but I don't know if that was done by A&P or some later tenant since I don't know when A&P closed. This store competed with a slightly newer Market Basket directly across the street...

Foodland International Opened: 2021 Owner:  unknown Previous Tenants:  assorted non-grocery tenants > V-Mart Market Cooperative:  none Location:  123 Church St, Lowell, MA Photographed:  October 8, 2023 Lowell is best known for being the city where Market Basket, the powerhouse regional chain with five locations in town, originated. But various other supermarkets have come and gone throughout the city, including Hannaford, which currently operates a supermarket to the east of downtown. Downtown Lowell today has two supermarkets: a relatively small Market Basket  just west of downtown, and this independent store called Foodland International to the southeast of the city center. Foodland International is a supermarket of about 12,000 square feet, and has a really interesting mix of international products along with some grocery basics. It takes up part of a uniquely-designed former department store; a big-chain supermarket was originally at the other end ...