TOUR: Stop & Shop - Chelmsford, MA

Stop & Shop
Opened: 2011

Owner: Ahold Delhaize

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: none

Location: 299 Chelmsford St, Chelmsford, MA

Photographed: July 3, 2024

Here in Chelmsford, two longtime New England supermarkets compete with each other directly across the street. In the northeastern part of town, near the Lowell border, a Market Basket dates back to the 1960s and in 2011, Stop & Shop opened a new-build location right across the street, moving out of the downtown area. It's definitely an unusual Stop & Shop, so this will be a fun tour. The building is fairly large, measuring around 70,000 square feet (about 10,000 square feet larger than Market Basket). And it's a combination of exterior store model and interior store design I would've never expected to exist. This exterior model originated in roughly the late 1990s, and Stop & Shop used it through to about 2004. By around 2005, they switched to a taller, more square exterior design, which they used at least through the logo change in 2008. So this store, built in 2011, using the design from nearly 10 years prior is unusual to be sure. Inside, it was one of the first (if not the first, I'm not sure) to use the backlit decor package we've seen in a few stores and it looks pretty great here. Despite the very attractive decor, this store is clearly struggling.

And we can get that impression right off the bat. Many of the deluxe features this store opened with were stripped out, including the first two departments we encounter in the front-left corner. A cafe that used to line the front wall in a space typically used for cart storage in this store model has been removed, leaving only a row of booths along the wall. The former nutritionist's office in the corner here is gone, too, and you can see both in this 2017 picture. The green wall is an online order pickup area, and there's actually a drive-through for online pickup on the other side of that wall, which is a great feature. Still, we can tell there's been a lot removed here. The rest of the store is fairly straightforward for Stop & Shop stores of this era, with produce on the left side, deli in the back-left corner along with some now-closed prepared foods counters, meat and seafood on the back wall, dairy and frozen on the right side, and a bank and bakery in the front-right corner. There's no pharmacy here, and I don't believe there ever was.

When I visited this store the day before July 4th last summer, it was completely deserted. You can see how few people show up in these pictures, although that's not always an accurate depiction (sometimes stores are busier than they appear and sometimes they seem busier in pictures). The Market Basket across the street, of course, was packed, and the Hannaford slightly to the north had a healthy crowd. Placer.ai, an imperfect tool that still can give us a ballpark estimate, suggests that this store gets roughly a third of the foot traffic of Market Basket and about half of the foot traffic of Hannaford. Hannaford, of course, is owned by Ahold Delhaize, as is Stop & Shop. But the difference between the two stores so close to each other here is jarring.

Now as we get to the back of the produce department, we can see how much the store has been cut back since its opening. The salad bar is now piled with bagged pistachios, for example.

The deli counter was nicely stocked with a solid cheese island across from it, but the prepared foods counters to the right of it were all closed up except for a small amount of sushi. (Hannaford had a fully-stocked sushi counter with two sushi chefs making fresh sushi to order for a customer when I visited on the same day.) The former hot food bar was piled with bags of tortilla chips. That's rarely a good sign.

It looks like this is an earlier version of this decor package. You can compare it to the decor in Pompton Plains I linked above, which has slightly different lighting and signage, but the bones are the same. This is maybe my favorite Stop & Shop decor package in the last couple decades.

The first few grocery aisles are a dedicated natural foods department with a great Nature's Promise sign.

Natural frozen and dairy are also in this area, but you can see the dairy case was a bit sparse.

This store is definitely spacious and clean, though.

I was surprised to see full-service meat and seafood counters still operating here, although there wasn't a clerk behind the counters. This store was clearly being run on essentially a skeleton crew when I visited.

Packaged meats are up next on the back wall. You can see that, like so many other S&S stores I've been to, stock is extremely thin. Some of that is definitely due to the July 4th holiday (although I'll be obnoxious and point out that Hannaford and Market Basket were both perfectly stocked, as we'll see when we visit those stores), but there were also some stranger out-of-stocks, as we'll see.

So Jamaican beef patties, crawfish, and a few other items here were completely out of stock. Obviously, those aren't key July 4th items that are liable to sell out right before the holiday (although some areas do have a tradition of crawfish boils on the 4th, but as far as I'm aware that's not a Massachusetts thing). In other words, these are things that really shouldn't be out of stock at this time.

In the area we might expect to see a pharmacy, this store has a Citizens Bank instead.

HABA fills the aisles extending from that area, on the right side of the store. And that, too, is thin on stock although it looks pretty good at first glance.

But look more carefully and you can see that, not only are many items like this toothpaste stocked pretty shallow, but there are actually empty white cardboard boxes behind the products, presumably to fill space. And yes, I can confirm the boxes were empty: I picked one up. Can't say I've seen that before, and obviously, it's not a great sign for this store's financial health.

My partner's family lives in Chelmsford, and they've reported that this store over the course of several years has removed quite a bit throughout -- leaving many areas with much more space than there used to be. Here in the dairy corner, it doesn't look like any fixtures were removed, but we can see that like in the corner where the cafe was, there's too much space.

The rest of the store, as far as I could tell, was fully stocked. Other than understaffing and poor corporate inventory practices, I don't have a good explanation for this or the other things I've seen at other Stop & Shops. We'll see if things improve under the new leadership.

Dairy and frozen in the last aisle.

In bakery, we can see one of the few signs of the otherwise very nice decor aging. If you look above the text, you can actually see the trim of the rectangular panels peeling off and falling down. Not a big deal, and really other than that (and the obvious scaling-back of several departments), this store still looks essentially brand-new.

Here's a look across the front-end...

And that about wraps up our look at the Chelmsford Stop & Shop! It's an uphill battle for anyone other than Market Basket around here, though, given that they originated in Lowell (which is extremely close to this Stop & Shop -- the city line is all of 200 yards from the building).

And speaking of Market Basket, of course tomorrow we'll be touring their store across the street!