Special Report: Stop & Shop - Acton, MA

Stop & Shop
Opened: December 13, 2024

Owner: Ahold Delhaize

Previous Tenants: Kmart

Cooperative: none

Location: 252 Main St, Acton, MA

Photographed: January 9, 2025

After a lot of bad news coming from Stop & Shop in the last year, the tide seems to have turned for real. The chain, under new corporate leadership, seems to be newly invigorated and store operations are better than ever. It's really good to see, and stronger competition is always good. Let's take a look at the new location in Acton, which we first saw in a post from our contributor Andrew. Andrew did send in pictures of the new store once it opened, but I actually was able to visit myself, too. Let's check it out!

The 58,000 square foot store is located in part of a former Kmart, having opened about a month ago, and replaces a much older and smaller location three miles south. (We'll tour that one shortly.) It's not a new-build store like their other recent opening in Boston is, but it's still for all intents and purposes a new store. Inside, you can feel the building is older, but it's been very extensively renovated to the latest decor package.

You walk into the grand aisle, with produce in the front and deli/prepared foods behind it. Seafood and meat are on the back wall, with dairy and frozen on the left side and bakery in the front-left corner.

The store still feels a bit sterile -- it doesn't have the charm or character of a store like this or the visual excitement of a store like this -- but that's nothing more than nitpicking, since this store is noticeably a step up from the stores they've been running. The selection is tighter and more streamlined but not limited, the perimeter looks really good (especially produce, which was excellent), and the prices were very reasonable.

You'll notice almost no people in these pictures, but I don't think that's a sign the store isn't getting traffic. I was here at 1:30 pm on a Thursday, and let's face it, who's shopping then? The perishables all looked great, so I have to assume there's enough turnover here. (I was at the Allston store just a couple weeks after it opened and the produce was noticeably worse than here in Acton.)

Prepared foods and deli line the right side of the back of the grand aisle. Once again, the sandwiches and flatbread pizzas looked very nice, but some stores that had features like that put in removed them quickly. We'll see if that stays, but so far so good.

Deli and several cheese islands are at the back.

A look across the back wall. You can tell inside the store that this is an older building, but Stop & Shop was careful to replace everything, including the flooring and ceiling, so it's not as easy to see.

A well-stocked seafood counter rounds out the grand aisle. There's no service meat counter, like Allston.

This signage, which Stop & Shop has been using for several years, is also a big step up from what came before it.

The grocery aisles are neat and well-stocked. There's a much smaller selection of general merchandise and HABA here than in some of the larger, older stores, but it doesn't feel like a particularly big loss. Instead, it feels like the selection is right to fill the size of the store.

In addition to their promise to lower prices (which started in Rhode Island and is now extending across the chain), Stop & Shop has clearly been more intentional lately about calling out sale prices and discounts on the shelves. Check out the sale tags on those HABA shelves, or the yellow promotional signage for lower chicken prices.

One of the reasons that this store might have the white drop ceiling and laminate tile floor rather than the polished concrete and exposed black ceiling of Allston is that the average customer here is much older than they are in Allston, and Stop & Shop may have wanted to go with a more traditional, older-feeling supermarket look.

As you can tell, all the fixtures in this store were brand-new for the new store. Nothing here is secondhand.

I do like the lit signage, too. It helps draw your attention to each department, but the effect is better with more dramatic lighting. (That's this store.)

Still, any complaints I have with this store are nothing but minor quibbles or personal preference. It's clear to me that Stop & Shop is serious about improving their operations, and so now the question is, can they replicate the success of a store like this across all of their stores, most of which are larger and older than this one?

Bakery is in the front-left corner, and they do bake in-store here.

The front-end has an unusual layout, with one entrance to the registers and then self-checkouts interspersed with staffed registers.

In addition to this combination of full- and self-service registers, there's a large bank of self-checkouts under the hanging wooden structure (would you call that a pergola?) on the far side.

While I wouldn't say this store is an all-time great, or that it radically changes the direction Stop & Shop is going in, I would say they've figured out how to significantly improve their formula with lower prices and better in-store execution. I'm really excited to see what other changes come to the existing stores, and maybe for more new stores soon! Speaking of changes, there's a lot going on in the northeast, so check out all the news here.