The Market Report

Açougue do João Butcher & Grocery Store Opened:  2018 Owner:  João Assis Previous Tenants:  Alexander's Supermarket > Rent-A-Center Cooperative:  none Location:  1653 Middlesex St, Lowell, MA Photographed:  August 23, 2025 We're going to see one more grocer in the far western part of Lowell, near the border of North Chelmsford . If you haven't seen my posts on the Wood Street Market Basket and Apna Bazar yet, make sure to check them out. Now we're off from India to Brazil. Get your boarding pass ready. Okay, before we travel to Brazil (metaphorically, of course), let's focus on this building a bit. It sure looks like an old chain supermarket, doesn't it? That's because it is. The building was originally an Alexander's Supermarket, a New Hampshire-based chain that Hannaford eventually acquired. It looks like this store closed at some point before Hannaford acquired the chain, but they did get locations in Chelmsford and Dracut, which we'll b...

Apna Bazar Farmers Market Opened: 2023 Owner:  Jaswinder Singh and Dipak Bhardwaj Previous Tenants:  CVS Cooperative:  none Location:  1815 Middlesex St, Lowell, MA Photographed:  August 23, 2025 There's been so many stores we've seen that are drugstores converted to supermarkets, but most are in the New York metro area . Apna Bazar has made its home in a former CVS here in Lowell, though, taking up 10,000 square feet of space vacated when CVS moved into the Market Basket strip mall across the street. In a way, it makes sense though, because Indian grocer chain Apna Bazar originated in the New York City area. That's where most of their stores are, but three are here in Massachusetts, Woburn (opened 2022), Norwood (opened around 2017), and Lowell (opened 2023). You enter on the left side of the store to a very well-stocked produce department in the first aisle. Bulk rice and grains are on the back wall, with dairy in the back half of the first aisle and froz...

Market Basket Opened: 2020 Owner:  DeMoulas family Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  90 Old Ferry Rd, Lowell, MA Photographed:  August 23, 2025 Across the Merrimack from the tiny Wood Street store, which is today's other post that you can visit here , is a sprawling, brand-new Market Basket that opened in 2020. If the store looks familiar, that's because a contributor sent in a photo of the store a while back, so we have seen the outside before. Also, all Market Baskets look the same, so there's that, too. This store is very big -- 75,000 square feet -- and still feels brand-new despite being five years old. Part of that is the, shall we say, timeless interior design. It looks exactly like the ca. 1950s store across the river. But another part of that, as I mention on that post, is the impeccable maintenance. This store is set up as a mirror image to the Wood Street store, with dairy in the first aisle on the right side. Deli and seafood ar...

Market Basket Opened: ca. late 1950s Owner:  DeMoulas family Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  11 Wood St, Lowell, MA Photographed:  August 23, 2025 Welcome back to Lowell! Today we're seeing two stores, both Market Baskets, in the northwestern part of town. (See the other one here .) There's a couple things you might notice right away from the outside of this store, and one is that it's newly renovated. The other is that it's incredibly small -- actually only 33,000 square feet, which makes it among the smallest Market Baskets. There's a truly tiny one in downtown Concord, NH that's only 28,000 square feet, but there are very few out there that are that small. It makes sense here, though, as we're in Lowell -- the city where Market Basket originated as Demoulas Superette way back in 1917. That was up in The Acre, a neighborhood of Lowell now home to UMass Lowell's campus about two miles northeast of here. But this store dates way ba...