TOUR: Market Basket - Brockton, MA

Market Basket
Opened: 2012

Owner: DeMoulas family

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: none

Location: 200 Westgate Dr, Brockton, MA

Photographed: July 6, 2019

Time for another Market Basket! It's been a while, so let's take an extensive tour of this store, built from the ground up in 2012. It's on the southern end of the Westgate Mall, not actually attached to the indoor mall, but on the same property. It replaced a department store anchor of the mall, which was demolished for this building.

The 81,000 square foot store is typical of the newer and larger Market Baskets, and is exactly what we've come to expect from the local cult-favorite chain. Dairy is in the first aisle on the right side of the store, with deli, cheese, and seafood at the back. Meat lines the back wall, with produce and frozen foods on the left side. Bakery, prepared foods, and the cafe are in the front-left corner.

Inside, of course, this store looks a whole lot like every other Market Basket we've seen. It's a sprawling, very crowded supermarket with a lot to choose from. According to an article from the store's opening, there are over 50,000 products and 500 employees at this store. (The average supermarket has closer to 35,000 products, per the FMI.)

You can barely even see the service deli and seafood departments here, what with all the people...

This store is located just across the street from an ALDI that opened five years after this store did.

This store doesn't have the newest feature that a store like Maynard, which is somewhat smaller but newer, does: a service butcher counter. Instead, what you can see here is rows of low, single-tiered meat refrigerators behind which butchers can stand and take special orders.

HABA is roughly in the middle of the store.

And frozen foods on the left side of the sales floor, with produce next to it.

On the front wall, bakery and prepared foods counters, with floral and produce opposite.

It's unusual to see a supermarket with produce in such a minimally-visible location -- for several decades, the preference has been to put it right up front and center, and in even newer Market Baskets it's very hidden -- but that's in line with Market Basket's general approach. They don't engage with any trends, and keep prices low and selection big.

Market Basket also tends to have a better selection of local produce (in season, of course) than competitors.

Outside of Brockton, this store competes most directly with a Roche Brothers about two miles west in Easton. But we're about a mile from the Vicente's on Pleasant Street and the Shaw's and AFB on the west side of town.

Even though they're not exciting, I do find Market Basket stores comforting because I got to know them pretty well when I lived in MA.

The prepared foods counters in Market's Kitchen line the front wall on the left side of the store, with the coffee shop facing towards the registers -- just out of frame to the left in the below picture -- and then the cafe seating area in the front, behind these counters.

The cafe, as you can see here, seems to be quite popular here, too.

And folks, that's a wrap on Brockton. Up next, we're headed just north to a group of towns near the southern border of Boston, so come back tomorrow to preview what's coming up!