The Market Report

AR Market Opened: 2020 Owner: Peter Roscini Colman Previous Tenants: furniture store Cooperative:  none Location: 159 N Main St, Barre, VT Photographed: August 13, 2025 Happy October, and as you've probably noticed, I've redesigned The Market Report's homepage! I'm still tweaking it a bit, but I hope you like it, and please let me know what you think. Now for today's post. It's a bit of a change to go from the general stores we've seen the last two days to this store, AR Market, whose name stands for Alimentari Roscini (and that was the full name of the store for a couple years). As you might have guessed from that name, it's an Italian specialty market. This 10,000 square foot building is also home to Pearl Street Pizza and Vermont Salumi, which are all under the same ownership. And that would be Peter Roscini Coleman, who opened this store in 2020. There are a few aisles of specialty imported groceries and some fresh items, plus a deli and prepare...

Addison Four Corners Store Opened: 2001 under current ownership; 1823 previously Owner: Herb and Terry Glidden Previous Tenants: none Cooperative:  none Location: 4934 VT-22A, Addison, VT Photographed: August 9, 2025 About seven miles north of Pratt's Store is another similar general store, although this one is smaller and not quite in supermarket territory. It looks like part deli, part convenience store, and part gift shop, with a gas station attached. It's around a 15-20 minute drive to Middlebury here, a larger town with bigger supermarkets. Like Pratt's Store, we can take a look around Addison Four Corners Store without me actually having been there... ...thanks to this interactive tour posted to Google Maps. Both this store and Pratt's have been fairly close to Middlebury, but now we're headed farther north, to the Burlington-Montpelier-Saint Albans area. The Market Report's first stop up there is in Barre, about 40 miles northeast, tomorrow!

Pratt's Store Opened: 1969 Owner: Darwin Pratt Previous Tenants: unknown Cooperative:  unknown Location: 2504 VT-22A, Bridport, VT Photographed: August 9, 2025 Our first store is the only grocer here in Bridport, Vermont -- a town of just about 1200 -- and it's Pratt's Store, a general store/small supermarket of around 4,000 square feet. It's been Pratt's since 1969, but it was likely another grocery store prior to that. It also has a gas station out front, as many of these small-town stores are really the one-stop shop. Now, my pictures are only from a drive-by in the summer of 2025, but thanks to these images posted by Adirondack Drone to Google Maps, we can actually see a full store tour thanks to this interactive set of views. I've included a few key ones below, but definitely click and drag to tour the store in 3-D! So it looks like grab and go prepared foods, frozen, and nonfoods are here in the first aisle on the left side. Deli and butcher are at ...

A lot of my Vermont store visits are up here in the northern half of the state, mostly from St. Albans to Montpelier and everything in between. There's a large variety of supermarkets up in this area, which is so far north that St. Albans is under 15 miles from the Canada border. We're going to begin in Bridport and Addison, kind of in the northern end of the central part of the state near the New York border, and then moving north via Barre and Montpelier, and then we head west through Waterbury, Stowe, and a number of the smaller towns in that area. We'll turn north to the Enosburg and St. Albans areas, then back down via Cambridge and environs before ending in the Burlington area. This will all take us several weeks, so sit back, relax, and enjoy this road trip through a stunningly beautiful area of New England!

Continuing the celebration of The Market Report's 10th year! Each month of 2026, I'll be posting a different special feature to celebrate my 10th year of writing this blog. There's a lot to see, so here's a summary of what we've done so far: January: Remembering A&P February: Best of 2016-2020 March: Back in Time ( Day 1 , Day 2 , Day 3 ) April: Recommended Reading May: Behind the Scenes June: Best of 2021-2025 July: Shop the City August:  Recommended Reading 2 Now onto September! I've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes, updating old posts with new pictures and new information. This is a process I started a while ago, and it's fairly labor-intensive so I've slowly been moving through some of the early blog posts. In some cases, I've significantly expanded the posts (maybe I only had a picture of the outside previously, and now it's a full tour), while in others, I've simply replaced old blurry pictures with new, better ones...

Price Chopper Opened: unknown Owner: Northeast Grocery Previous Tenants: unknown Cooperative: none Location: 263 Depot St, Manchester, VT Photographed: August 12, 2021 Just between the former Grand Union and current Shaw's in Manchester Center is this Price Chopper, and yes, this is a terrible photo and I'm aware of that. Here's what the exterior actually looks like, and this store does appear to truly have a pitched roof. It's a very small Price Chopper, possibly in the 20,000 square foot range, and looks fine if a little dated inside . I wasn't able to find out much on the history of this location, but I did find a news article from 2001 saying that Price Chopper was buying Manchester's Grand Union and moving their existing store into that location. The article didn't provide any addresses, so it sounds like this store attempted to move into what's now the Shaw's but didn't. It's also possible that this  was also a Grand Union, and ...

Shaw's Opened: 2001 Owner: Albertsons Companies Previous Tenants: Grand Union (ca. 1980s-2001) Cooperative: none Location: 64 Equinox Terr, Manchester, VT Photographed: August 12, 2021 Okay, we've already toured one Grand Union-turned-Shaw's in Wilmington , now let's check out another! Grand Union built this store in the 1980s or so, replacing an older location in town (more on that soon). It measures around 42,000 square feet, making it significantly larger than Wilmington. I visited this store in the summer of 2021, and since then, it's gotten some minor renovations and held a grand reopening. One much-needed change was redoing the signage outside to drop this small and off-center logo. The outside also got a full fresh coat of paint, and that's good because this rather rundown exterior belies the very nice interior. But before we head inside, check out these posters near the entrance still advertising Wild Harvest and Essential Everyday items, roughly ...