The Market Report

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...

  It's time to return to the city of Lowell and its environs (see previous coverage here )! The city is notable in the supermarket world for being the birthplace of Market Basket, so the fact that The Market Report's coverage the first time around was only a very quick look at one of the four Market Baskets in town seems unconscionable. In late August, I got the chance to return to the city, so we'll be seeing all four Market Baskets in town along with a couple other stores, plus one just outside the city in Dracut. For now, enjoy the weekend, and I'll see you on Monday for a look at two Market Baskets!

Shaw's Opened: unknown Owner:  Albertsons Companies Previous Tenants:  unknown Cooperative:  none Location:  93 Prospect St, Milford, MA Photographed:  August 24, 2025 Having seen the Trader Joe's , Stop & Shop , ALDI , and Big Y to the northeast of downtown Milford, it's now time to move west for the Shaw's, the only store in Milford west of downtown. (This is a city with a lot of competition, though, along with a Market Basket just south of town and a Price Chopper in the next town north!) I unfortunately don't have much history on this Shaw's. I couldn't confirm whether this was an Iandoli supermarket, as most of the Worcester-area Shaw's were originally. And HistoricAerials.com doesn't give me much information beyond the fact that the store was built by 1967, then either rebuilt or simply expanded to the present 50,000 square feet in the early 1990s. This unintentionally aesthetically pleasing photo welcomes us to the store tour, and it gi...