Price Rite Marketplace - Roslindale, MA

Price Rite Marketplace

Opened: 2020

Owner: Todd Slawsby / Madison Foods

Previous Tenants: Save-A-Lot (converted 2020)

Cooperative: Wakefern Food Corp.

Location: 650 American Legion Hwy, Roslindale, MA

Photographed: May 20, 2022

Beginning in 2020, Save-A-Lot underwent a reorganization. It switched the chain from a retailer with some locations franchised to exclusively a wholesaler with all stores franchised. During that transition, a lot of stores were closed or sold, leading to a much more significant variation in Save-A-Lot stores. Others left Save-A-Lot entirely but kept their stores, just under a new name. That's what happened with the Save-A-Lot stores here in Boston, all three of which transitioned to Price Rite in 2020. (We also saw that in Brockton, as all four stores share an owner.)

Madison Foods joined the Wakefern Food cooperative in 2020, a cooperative best known for its ShopRite stores. (In the Save-A-Lot franchise model, independent owners license the brand and get certain services from the corporate division, but in a cooperative model, the independent owners actually also co-own the corporate division.) Not much changed inside the store -- see before here -- other than the replacement of the various Save-A-Lot private labels with Wakefern's Bowl & Basket, Wholesome Pantry, and Paperbird brands, and of course a repaint and some new decor.

If you compare this store to a full-fledged, corporately owned Price Rite like we saw in Hyde Park, you can see this model is much closer to the Save-A-Lot operations than to the standard Price Rite setup.

The layout didn't change in the transition from Save-A-Lot to Price Rite, and the fixtures didn't, either. Just new paint and signage.

Of course, we get the benefit here of returning with a much better phone camera, so the pictures don't look so dark and grainy. But I'm still glad I have my 2019 Boston pictures, because it's a huge archive capturing a specific moment in time.

You can see that the grocery aisles are set up exactly the way they were, but the brands have changed.

And new wood-texture decals are on the fronts of the frozen foods cases. I don't think that really works, but I appreciate the effort. (Nobody asked me, but I would've painted them all black to freshen them up.)

And a look across the front-end...

One more thing before we leave the property... you don't have to work too hard to figure out what store used to occupy a neighboring space in the mall. (For the young'uns, it's Blockbuster Video.)

Enjoy the weekend, and on Monday, we'll take a look at an independent grocer right across the street with another before-and-after post!