TOUR: Shaw's - Ashland, MA

Shaw's
Opened: ca. early 1990s

Owner: Albertsons Companies

Previous Tenants: unknown

Cooperative: none

Location: 301 Pond St, Ashland, MA

Photographed: March 18, 2022

Hello and welcome to our first Framingham-area store tour, this one a Shaw's about three miles south of Framingham's downtown. This store opened around the 1990s, and it actually appears to have been built as a supermarket -- not a department store, as I originally assumed, although I don't know that for a fact. It was expanded once to its present 55,000 square feet.

We enter on the right side to the grand aisle -- it's a very typical Shaw's layout -- with produce in the front-right corner, then deli and prepared foods lining the right side wall. Cheese, meat, and seafood are at the back of the grand aisle, with meats lining the rest of the back wall. Dairy and frozen are on the left side, with bakery in the front-left corner. This store doesn't have a pharmacy, and doesn't appear to ever have had one; there's a Walgreens in the same strip mall that could have exclusive pharmacy rights.

The grand aisle is spacious and pleasant, and I like the new flooring. The renovation here was relatively simple, and previously the store had a very attractive version of Premium Fresh & Healthy 1.0.

It looks like this store does a solid business, because we can see the perishable departments are all stocked very fully. It competes most directly with a Market Basket just north, which we'll see shortly.

This cheese shop appears to date at least to the PF&H 1.0 remodel, and it appears to have taken over a case of the deli department, too. Notice that the front glass panel has been removed to make it self-service.

Sushi, meat, and seafood are all together on the back wall. Notice the aisle markers, a treatment we've actually seen before in a very similar store.

Nice meat and seafood counters for sure, and the tile backsplash left over from the PF&H 1.0 days remains.

Here, the flooring looks much better throughout than Shrewsbury, because here, they appear to have replaced all of the perimeter flooring.

Check out the remaining Premium Fresh & Healthy category markers on the milk cases!

Some of the refrigeration and freezers look older, possibly original to the store.

New flooring down the last aisle, too.

The self-serve bakery cases weren't replaced in the renovation, and they didn't get the new signage many stores did in the renovation. (That's Northbridge.)

Here you can see the aisle markers, which are angled down.

And the front-end. This store feels very spacious, and we can see there's a lot of space around, but it didn't feel completely desolate. It does appear to be doing just fine despite the Market Basket just up the street.

And one more look at the outside before we move along...

If you look at aerial photos of this strip mall, you can see a space at the south end that was almost certainly designed for a supermarket. It's a rectangle of around 35,000 square feet, now covered by a somewhat awkward parking lot. Perhaps, depending on the timing, the mall was constructed with the intention of a department store anchor at the north end -- such as Ames -- and a supermarket at the south end, but the department store pulled out (since chains like Ames were struggling right around the time this mall was built). So the supermarket just decided to move into the larger spot and the smaller anchor space was never built, since I can't find any evidence that the southern end spot was ever actually a building but it does look like it should've been one. Maybe someone who knows the history of this area can illuminate the mall's history! And for tomorrow, we're off to the Market Basket just north.