America's Food Basket - Dorchester, MA (Fields Corner)

America's Food Basket
Open: 2006-2020

Owner: Edwin Polanco

Previous Tenants: Supreme Markets (late 1960s-late 1970s) > Purity Supreme (opened ca. late 1970s) > Capitol Supermarket (closed 2006)

Later Tenants: Price Rite Marketplace (2020- )

Cooperative: America's Food Basket

Location: 500 Geneva Ave, Dorchester, MA

Photographed: June 15, 2019

Well, you can tell something's up with this store just from that exterior picture. What's going on with the temporary banner for a store that had been open for 13 years when I visited? Well, this store's history is actually quite interesting. It was constructed with the rest of this strip mall at Fields Corner in the late 1960s as a Surpeme Market, a local chain owned by the Cifrino family. Supreme merged with Purity Food Stores, becoming Purity Supreme by the late 1970s. Purity Supreme was acquired by Pathmark owner Supermarkets General Corporation in 1984, and SGC later sold the chain to Stop & Shop in 1994. I don't know if this location ever operated as a Stop & Shop, but it seems that around that time, this location closed and became a Capitol Supermarket. Capitol, a local chain owned by the Slawsby family, operated here until 2006 when they closed. America's Food Basket opened the same year, and in 2015, they failed to extend their lease and were informed they were out. Here's where it gets interesting: the property owners were still the Cifrinos, and they weren't letting AFB renew the lease because they already had a new tenant lined up: the Slawsbys, who wanted to return to the space, now under the Save-A-Lot name. Apparently, it was around that time that the AFB sign came down, but AFB fought to stay. So they put up the temporary banner you see there in my 2019 photos. AFB actually stayed open until 2020, five years after they were supposed to close, and by then the Slawsbys had left Save-A-Lot and joined Price Rite. So Price Rite opened by the end of 2020, and you can tour the Price Rite here.

Now that the history is out of the way, the store will actually make a lot more sense. More on that shortly. At around 30,000 square feet, this was the largest America's Food Basket in Boston, and on the larger side for the cooperative in general.

Produce and deli/bakery were on the left side of the store, with packaged meats, the butcher counter, and dairy in the rest of the first aisle. Frozen foods lined the back wall of the store. It's a deep but narrow store.

It's clear AFB knew they were on borrowed time, and they stopped taking care of the store to a certain extent (such as the exterior sign). Until the end, it was still clean and well-stocked, but it was in pretty bad shape by the time I visited in 2019.

Now here's where it gets interesting: this decor is almost certainly left over from Purity Supreme's time here, given that the font matches Purity Supreme's logo at the time. The red and blue stripes are also almost definitely from that same time, although it's possible they were added later by either Capitol or AFB to freshen up the store. It looks like either Capitol or AFB rearranged the store a bit, and dairy and frozen received banners rather than real department signage. My guess is that that was AFB.

I wouldn't be surprised if dairy was in this whole area originally, with frozen foods lining the last aisle. We'll see clearly that there used to be some fixtures in the last aisle that had been removed.

Because of the store's depth, the grocery aisles were split in half.

Hard to tell whether these aisle markers were installed by AFB -- is the white rectangle just a design choice or a decal over the Capitol logo? -- but you can see the original AFB logo here, along with the branding for Americas' Food Basket (as opposed to America's Food Basket, a distinction I mentioned on the Codman Square post).

My guess is that this store would've needed a lot more work around the time Price Rite came in regardless of which tenant occupied it, but AFB hadn't been doing repairs or cosmetic updates because they knew they were likely to leave soon.

There are seven aisles in total, but because they're split the front half is 1-7 and the rear half is 8-13.

Here it's pretty clear that something -- my guess is freezer cases -- was removed from the last aisle. Again, I don't know if that was a change made by AFB or Capitol.

And a look at the front-end, with a very old-school look! Are those Purity Supreme checkout lane markers too? Plus, the clock! Every ACME of the 1970s and 80s had one, and they popped up in various other supermarkets.

While this wasn't a bad store, it certainly needed a lot of work and it felt like AFB stopped putting in the effort to keep it up. You can even see the 10th Anniversary posters -- AFB's 10th anniversary was two years before I visited this store, but they didn't change even that.

Don't miss touring the new Price Rite here, which feels like a brand-new store. And tomorrow, we're off to a very small supermarket just a couple blocks north!