Coming Soon!

In the summer of 2019, I moved to Boston for a few months for a job. While I was there, I made it my mission to visit every supermarket in Boston -- which I did -- but I also branched out and visited stores in some of the suburbs like Brookline, Newton, Quincy, Malden, and a few others. The farthest I managed to make it outside of Boston (by train) is here, to Brockton, a city of a little over 100,000 people about 20 miles south of downtown Boston. I returned in the fall of 2022 to check out a few stores that opened, closed, or renovated. We'll be spending about a month touring the city from south to north, visiting almost every supermarket in town. There's quite a bit of grocery history here in Brockton -- what's today called Shaw's was originally Brockton Public Market, which they later rebranded as BPM Grocers. Shaw's history is quite interesting and a bid roundabout: per Wikipedia, George C. Shaw opened a store in 1860 in Portland, ME, and shortly thereafter a different entrepreneur opened Brockton Public Market here in town. BPM acquired the Shaw's chain in 1919, but it wasn't until the late 1970s that BPM became Shaw's here in Massachusetts. Today, Shaw's and Star Market are based in West Bridgewater, a few miles south. Two Shaw's stores are still in Brockton, along with a handful of independents and other supermarkets. But there was previously another Shaw's in the southern part of the city, which we'll be seeing tomorrow!