TOUR: Wegmans - Burlington, MA

Wegmans

Opened: 2015

Owner: Wegman family

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: none

Location: 53 3rd Ave, Burlington, MA

Photographed: August 19, 2024

It's time for another Wegmans! Most recently, we saw the Northborough location, which was the first in Massachusetts. Four years later, Wegmans opened up here in Burlington in a development called Third Avenue. The store is large, at over 130,000 square feet, but condensed a bit in that the parking lot is a two-floor parking garage, and the store itself has an entrance on the ground level and a second floor.

You might notice there's not really a sign on the front of the store, and that's because it only faces the parking garage. The garage itself, which you can see above (and is very nicely designed from the street), has a sign, as does the corner of the building that faces the traffic circle where most cars enter the store.

Here we are on the second floor of the parking garage. Funny how, from here, the storefront looks basically like a slightly shorter Wegmans store. I'm sure that's not accidental; it must have been designed to look essentially normal from either level.

Here you can see the expansive storefront and the streets and traffic circle, to the far right.

The whole building is designed extraordinarily well, and it's extremely attractive from the outside. Plus, the outdoor space is used well, with outdoor seating and a pleasant concourse between the storefront and the parking garage.

If you enter on the second floor, you'll walk into the cafe area, with escalators bringing traffic up and down. Let's take a look, given that that location also gives us a spectacular view of the supermarket itself.

The layout is quite typical for a Wegmans. The grand aisle is on the right side, with prepared foods and meat/seafood lining the outside and bakery/deli facing them in an island. Produce is to the left of that, with dairy at the back, pharmacy in an island facing the first aisles, frozen in the middle, and nonfoods on the left side. Also in the front left corner is a large liquor store.

The view from the second floor of a supermarket is always fun, but here it's really beautiful with the bright colors and particularly nice lighting.

Now let's head downstairs to check out the store on the main level.

While I don't love everything about Wegmans -- the prepared foods and baked goods quality has declined significantly in the last few years, from what I can tell -- they still run really nice stores with generally extremely high standards.

I've found produce to be rarely good at my local Wegmans, but here, it looked great across the department.

Below, we're looking to the right to the prepared foods departments in the front-right corner.

And here you can see a couple of things that make this store special. The second floor cafe is visible, of course, but that's not unique to this store. What is a bit more unusual is the large windows on the side here, which face the street that runs alongside the store.

I love the lighting above the departments' awnings.

As we move to the back of the grand aisle, we encounter seafood divided between an island and a smaller counter on the perimeter wall.

Packaged meats are in the back-right corner.

Although their decor is fairly simple, Wegmans does make good use of accents, like the red panels and string lights you can see below. It adds some nice visual interest, and keeps the stores from feeling overwhelmingly big.

Floral is at the back of the produce department along with cheese.

Wegmans is such an interesting cross between higher-end and lower-end, because the stores tend to have lots of specialty selections but also rather low prices on the basics; higher-end decor and ambiance but lower-end touches like the yellow sale signs you can see below.

Pharmacy and HABA in the first few aisles.

Frozen foods are up next, which in Wegmans stores means they're closer to HABA and therefore up the middle of the store, rather than near a perimeter as we typically see in other chains.

At the far end of the store, this warehouse-type shelving is used for nonfoods and a few other categories.

And in the last aisle, we find an entrance to the large liquor store.

Again, it's a combination of higher-end and lower-end, with rows of straightforward wine on warehouse shelves next to a Fine Wine Room with wooden shelving and cases.

And then we continue circling to come to the front-end around the corner from the liquor store.

It looks like this store's opening may have hurt the nearby Shaw's, as I mentioned on that store's post. But Burlington is still a retail center, with lots of malls and big-box stores, and that includes quite a few supermarkets. Tomorrow we're off to one just a mile away!