Stop & Shop - Milford, MA

Stop & Shop
Opened: November 2017

Owner: Ahold Delhaize

Previous Tenants: Kmart

Cooperative: none

Location: 126 Medway Rd, Milford, MA

Photographed: August 24, 2025

The Market Report arrives at the largest supermarket in Milford! This 70,000 square foot Stop & Shop opened in 2017, occupying most of an extensively-renovated former Kmart. Stop & Shop moved from a slightly smaller, 80s-era store (the octagonal kind) about 2/3 of a mile northwest. Interestingly enough, the Home Goods and TJ Maxx that were previously next to the old Stop & Shop moved with Stop & Shop and now occupy the remainder of the former Kmart space. The former Stop & Shop has been remodeled but doesn't appear to have a new tenant yet.

The new store is spacious -- it feels absolutely huge -- and still spots the wood-grain decor it had when it opened. It still feels like a very new store, although it's not operating at the full capacity it was when it opened. More on that soon.

The massive grand aisle is on the right side of the store, with produce lining the right side and an island on the left side being the home of bakery, prepared foods, deli, and service meat and seafood counters. A cafe, including a Starbucks and a juice bar, is at the front of the grand aisle, though the juice bar has been closed. Packaged meat and seafood line the back wall of the store, with frozen and dairy on the left side in the last few aisles. In an unusual layout twist, the pharmacy is actually in an island in the last few grocery aisles, in front of frozen and dairy, with a few short diagonal aisles stocked with health and beauty.

The kitchen has been cut back a bit since the store opened, with basically all of the ready-to-eat food items long gone but a selection of grab-and-go things in its place. Still, there are some areas that are obvious, such as this former hot food bar.

There's a large cheese island at the back of the grand aisle, a very nice touch that is possibly a holdover from the best days of Super Stop & Shop. I'm not sure if this was originally a service department, but it's a nice setup that's a bit more deluxe than what's going in newer stores.

Packaged seafood at the back of the grand aisle, with the service counter in the deli-bakery island opposite.

And the service butcher counter is visible to the right in the above photo. It faces the back wall of the store, with the packaged meats on that wall.

You'll hardly see anybody in these pictures, and I'm not quite sure why that is. I visited around 3pm on a Sunday, which should theoretically be a big shopping time. Looking at Placer.ai, this store does a perfectly healthy business with between 70,000 and 80,000 customers a month (that's normal/good for a store of this size). The slightly smaller Big Y down the street does considerably less traffic, with closer to 40,000 visits a month. And the even smaller Shaw's across town also does a robust business with around 80,000 visits a month (when I checked all the stores at the time of writing -- obviously that's subject to change). We'll be touring the Big Y and the Shaw's in the coming days.

The smoothie and juice bar didn't make it here, and the service counter has been closed with packaged juice and a few assorted baked goods now displayed in this refrigerator at the front of the grand aisle. I'm thoroughly confused by what appear to be employee shirts placed on mannequins (or at least busts?) sitting on top of the former service counter. They have name tags and everything.

There's a small seating area here, too, along with a Starbucks kiosk. All of these were probably intended for pre-COVID times, as there's not really anything ready-to-eat here anymore.

The bakery is across from this cafe.

Over in the grocery aisles, the store feels a lot like an older Stop & Shop but isn't bad at all. It's spacious and clean, and seems like it would be pleasant to shop in.

I'm not entirely sure what prompted the move in 2017 -- but my theory is that perhaps another supermarket was sniffing around the Kmart space (I'm looking at you, Market Basket, which is notably absent from the Milford grocery landscape but has a location to the south in Bellingham). Stop & Shop would rather build a brand-new, state of the art store than let a competitor move in and potentially harm their aging existing store.

This faint gray texture on the walls here didn't make it into many of the later remodels, which tended to be even less visually interesting than this -- an impressive feat.

Here's a look inside the old location before it closed.

Dairy and frozen are in the last few aisles, with pharmacy and health and beauty in the front part of some of the aisles on this side.

I don't believe I've ever seen this setup in a Stop & Shop of any era before. It seems like it's an awfully strange choice to put the pharmacy in an island here instead of simply on the front wall at the front of these aisles, which is what similar stores owned by the same company were doing at the time.

The short health and beauty aisles are an interesting choice here, too, and not something that I see too often.

A look across the front-end...

Notice that the flooring isn't actually polished concrete, as it may appear at first glance, but a very neutral gray tile. I don't understand Ahold's ongoing obsession with gray in everything. Even their nicer, newer stores are very, very gray. Compare that to the very colorful Delhaize side of the conglomerate, whose new stores are colorful and vibrant, not drab and gray.

That brings us to the end of this Stop & Shop, and tomorrow The Market Report heads just down the street to take a look at another, much smaller supermarket in town!