TOUR: Stop & Shop - Quincy, MA (Southern Artery)

Stop & Shop

Opened: ca. 1950s; expanded ca. 1990s

Owner: Ahold Delhaize

Previous Tenants: unknown

Cooperative: none

Location: 495 Southern Artery, Quincy, MA

Photographed: August 4, 2019

Welcome to Stop & Shop's hometown! The chain originated in Somerville, just to the north of Boston, and has long been associated with the Boston area. Today, the headquarters for the chain -- owned by Dutch supermarket conglomerate Ahold Delhaize -- are in downtown Quincy...

...and about half a mile east is this Stop & Shop on Southern Artery. Although it dates back to the 1950s, it was renovated and expanded to its present 72,000 square feet in the 1990s.

There are a handful of relics around the property, although the store itself is unremarkable, including this retro enter sign and the tall, multi-legged Stop & Shop sign you can see in front of the store.

But despite the fact that the store isn't particularly special, it's very obviously been kept up extremely well because it's the closest to the headquarters. Another well-kept location is around two miles northwest in North Quincy, which we'll see shortly.

I've only visited this store once, back in the summer of 2019. It's since been renovated (around 2020) to the boring all-gray package, but it's still looking good.

In a very standard Super Stop & Shop layout from these 90s-era stores, you enter to the grand aisle on the right side. There's a natural foods department in the front-right corner along with produce, then deli and prepared foods along the right-side wall. Meat, seafood, and dairy are on the back wall, with frozen on the left side and bakery and pharmacy in the front-left corner.

It's clearly an important Stop & Shop location when both service meat and service seafood are fully up and running, and fully stocked at the time of my visit.

You can get a sense of how large the store is on the back wall here.

This store is near Adams Shore and Houghs Neck, coastal peninsulas that likely shop here. There's a small grocer in Adams Shore that we'll see on Wednesday.

Dairy, as is typical for stores of this model, begins on the back wall and continues a little bit down the last aisle. Bread lines the rest of the outside of the last aisle.

Executed well, this decor package can be really nice. But the one thing that I will never like about it is these white fruit-slice symbols. It's so easy to glance at this and think it's exposed spackle, perhaps covering brackets where a sign was previously mounted.

HABA in the last few aisles before frozen foods. Note the somewhat unusual aisle markers, which here are in the middle of the aisles rather than at the ends.

It doesn't look like the freezers and refrigeration were replaced in the fruit-slice remodel, but it also looked like they were in good shape. I don't know how extensive the 2020 remodel was.

Bakery in the front-left corner.

And a look across the front-end, with the more typical grocery aisle markers visible on the far left side.

There's one more thing of note in this area, which is that on the property just next door in 1950, the very first Dunkin' Donuts opened up. It's still there and still operating as a Dunkin', with what appears to be a replica of the original sign.

For comparison, check out this page from Dunkin', which has a picture of the original store. A cool sight! There's a small independent grocery store just across the street from this Stop & Shop, which we'll take a look at tomorrow. Stay tuned!