Shaw's - Milford, MA

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 gives us a clue about what we're about to see inside. Notice the bottle return sign from the Premium Fresh & Healthy 1.0 decor package (and if you have no idea what I'm talking about, don't worry, I'll explain). This foyer extends across the front of the store, and you enter on the right side to floral and produce. Seafood, deli, and butcher counters are in the back-right corner of the store, with packaged meats on the back wall. Dairy and frozen are on the left side of the store, with bakery in the front-left corner. No pharmacy here, because until recently, there was a drugstore next door. It was a Walgreens before it closed, but before that, a Rite Aid.

At 50,000 square feet, this store isn't small, but it definitely feels small. It has a very old-school feel inside -- much more like an expanded 1950s store than a 1990s store, so I'm assuming the original supermarket building is still standing and was just expanded.

The aesthetics of this store are fascinating to me, and I really don't know what the background here is. Let's start with the outside. You might notice, if you look very carefully, that the exterior sign is the older Shaw's logo (like this, not this; it's a very subtle difference) but I can tell you from being there in person -- the lettering is absolutely brand-new and very vividly colored, not faded at all as it was before. So they actually went to the trouble of refitting a ca. 1990s sign with new letters rather than simply replacing the lettering altogether. Inside, as you can already tell, the updates are similarly haphazard. Here's a look at how this decor was originally intended in a newer, more deluxe store. At some point, a long time ago -- before 2017 -- the wooden slats and black-and-white photos from this decor were added, but the decor wasn't fully swapped. We've actually seen this exact thing before, in Shrewsbury, which has since gotten a full remodel.

Shaw's latest remodels involve a lot of work, often including all-new fixtures and refrigeration. It looks like the refrigerators on the perimeter may have been replaced fairly recently, but the islands in the middle certainly weren't.

In fact, this island displaying organic produce is still Wild Harvest-branded -- a relic from when Supervalu owned Shaw's, and they sold the chain in 2014!

New islands for prepared foods and packaged deli in the back, though, while the cheese islands were just painted. At the rate that Shaw's has been remodeling stores lately, I doubt it'll stay like this long.

One very obvious sign of work that has been done without regards to the aesthetics: see the white ceiling tiles around the store? The ceiling here was painted a dark beige, almost green color in the Premium Fresh & Healthy remodel, which would've happened around 2005-2008 or so. At some point since then, they've replaced the recessed lighting panels built into the ceiling with the newer, brighter tube lights, but they never repainted the ceiling. I have to imagine that if this store gets a full remodel in the future, these various loose ends will be addressed.

In the meantime, it doesn't seem to matter much. The store was pretty busy when I visited, and according to Placer.ai, this is actually the highest-traffic supermarket in Milford, seeing around 80,000 visits a month. The Stop & Shop gets just slightly less traffic, but it's 20,000 square feet larger than this store. Typically, you can expect a larger store to get higher traffic, though it doesn't always work out that way.

So perhaps if this store is busy and profitable, the minor aesthetic questions don't matter. But Shaw's has been doing a lot of remodels lately, so I imagine it's just a matter of time.

"Guaranteed Fresh" added more recently, when the walls were painted probably.

The grocery aisles are clean and generally well-stocked, and as you can see the store doesn't seem neglected. But the different colors in the ceiling (and here, in the former natural foods department, the flooring) are definitely noticeable. It's the type of thing that the average customer won't pick up on specifically, but will get a general sense of the store being dated in a way that it's not really.

Shaw's has recently stepped up their international foods game, which is nice to see. This store had significant Latin American selections as well as an expanded Asian foods department. I've seen similar expanded product mixes going into the Worcester stores.

The cases here were probably installed during the PF&H remodel, but have more recently been painted and gotten new doors.

In many recent remodels, Shaw's has been replacing all the freezers. If this store gets a renovation, I would expect to see new freezers going in.

The text on the wall here was installed fairly recently, probably between 2014 and 2017, when the photos were added and all the walls were painted.

Notice that the bakery looks a lot like it would in the newer stores (that's Brockton), but with slightly different signage.

A look across the front-end. The "thank you" sign on the front wall is also newer.

Quite the interesting store here! I'm glad I got to photograph it in this in-between state, but I'm sure sooner or later it'll get a full remodel. And that's all for our trip to Milford! Come back tomorrow for a look at what's next.