Star Market - Mattapan, MA

Star Market

Opened: 2014

Owner: Albertsons Companies

Previous Tenants: Shaw's (2003-2014)

Cooperative: none

Location: 4 River St, Mattapan, MA

Photographed: June 15, 2019

Welcome to Boston, everybody! This is where we'll be spending the next several months, touring the city from south to north. Feel free to refer to the map in the graphic above to get a sense of where we are in each post, but at the end of each neighborhood (or group of neighborhoods, as is the case here), I'll post a map showing each store so you can get an idea of where they are in relation to each other.

It's fitting that our first stop in Boston is a Star Market, given that it's the biggest player here in town. Star Market and sister chain Shaw's have a combined 10 stores in Boston, while their main rival Stop & Shop has nine. Whole Foods has six, America's Food Basket has five, Trader Joe's has four, and the rest of what we'll see here in Boston is assorted other grocers. (Incidentally, I've photographed every supermarket in Boston except for the newest Trader Joe's.)

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's check out this Star Market! The store, located in what appears to be a converted industrial space, opened in 2003 as a Shaw's. As I mentioned in Quincy, there was some shuffling back and forth between Shaw's and Star Market. Star Market had an older store just a couple blocks west, and that store was replaced with this Shaw's. In 2014, this location returned to Star Market.

Interestingly, the store (which presumably opened with this decor) was renovated towards the end of its life as a Shaw's, receiving the so-called Premium Fresh & Healthy 3.0, a no-nonsense decor package developed by Supervalu when they owned Shaw's and Star Market. Often, a renovation to that decor was a step down because of how simple it was, and I imagine this store was probably quite nice when it opened. It was certainly nice when I visited in 2019, too, but it was not beautiful.

The store was renovated at some point after my visit, too, into the standard Star Market decor package. We saw a version of it in Quincy but we'll see more variations on it as we move through the city. Although it has some similarities to this decor package used in Safeway stores, including the font, it's not the same decor.

This store is about 45,000 square feet, but it feels much larger inside. Produce is in the front-left corner, with deli and prepared foods lining the rest of the first aisle. Bakery and service meat/seafood are at the back of the grand aisle, with packaged meats lining the rest of the back wall. Dairy, frozen, and HABA are on the right side. No pharmacy here, and if the store ever had a pharmacy -- which I doubt -- it would've had to close within a few years of the store's opening.

Notice the distinctive Shaw's flooring here. It looks like flooring has since been replaced at least on the perimeter of the store. The layout, though, is still a very distinctly Shaw's setup.

Packaged deli items line the right side of the first aisle. The layout is almost exactly a mirror image of the Webster Square store I linked above, which makes sense given the two stores opened at almost exactly the same time. But Webster Square is nearly double the size of this store.

I'm not particularly a fan of the department signage hanging in front of the wall but not in front of the department. Especially given the lack of any focused lighting on them, they kind of disappear. I don't know fully how the new decor is set up.

The grocery aisles are very straightforward. Unlike Webster Square, there's no middle dividing aisle here.

I do love the skylights in the ceiling, though. It keeps the store overall very bright and airy feeling.

It looks like the freezers are relatively new and probably not original. The flooring most certainly is original, but it's in excellent shape.

The other refrigeration, which wasn't that old when PF&H 3.0 came in, was painted black.

Although the larger, more deluxe signage is gone, they stuck with the Wellbeing brand for HABA here. I don't believe the other Albertsons brands used the Wellbeing branding.

Other assorted nonfoods are also here. This is, of course, where there would've been a pharmacy if the store had one originally, but I couldn't find evidence of that and there's no pharmacy signage on the exterior as far back as 2007. I find it unlikely a pharmacy opened in 2003 and was closed by 2007, but the store is doing fine all these years later.

And a look across the front-end...

Even despite the shuffling between Star Market and Shaw's, Boston still has two Shaw's within the city limits. We'll see those, including one just west in Hyde Park. But tomorrow, we'll be stopping by two stores at the main intersection in Mattapan. Come back to check it out!