Stop & Shop - Lynn, MA

Stop & Shop
Opened: between 1995 and 2001

Owner: Ahold Delhaize

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: none

Location: 35 Washington St, Lynn, MA

Photographed: August 3, 2019

It's been over a year and a half that I've been posting Massachusetts stores (remember this very first MA post out in Lee?) and the truth is there's quite a bit of repetition here. I mentioned that on a Market Basket post here in Lynn. So really, you can take a glance at the outside of this store and pretty much get it immediately: it's a late 90s-build Stop & Shop, originally a Super Stop & Shop that opened with this decor package. Of course, what's interesting is any differences and variations either built into the store originally or that have happened over time. So let's check it out!

Unfortunately, we'll see very little unusual about this store. Inside, it was most recently renovated around 2017, shortly before I took these pictures in 2019. It's not that different from this store I posted in Worcester, for instance. My best guess is that, prior to the current decor package, it had this one.

As for an even more recent post, it's not all that different from the Malden location, most recently renovated around the same time and built around the same time in the same style. This store is a mirror image, though, with the grand aisle on the left side (and I don't honestly know how those layout decisions are made -- it seems equally reasonable for either one of these stores to be set up in the reverse way). Floral is in the front-left corner, with deli and prepared foods on the rest of the left-side wall. The former natural foods department between floral and prepared foods is now an expansion of the produce department. Meat, seafood, and dairy are on the back wall, with frozen foods and HABA on the right side. Bakery and pharmacy are in the front-right corner.

At 70,000 square feet, this store is slightly smaller than Malden.

You can see here that the merchandising in this former natural foods department is not quite as sharp as it is in Malden. Malden's setup is very well-organized and carefully thought out, while this feels a little more random (and you can see the refrigerators and freezers left over from natural foods on the wall at the back). Note that, at the time of the renovation, this was still a natural foods department.

Kitchen and deli are just behind that produce alcove on the left-side wall.

It does seem that, although most of the Stop & Shops north of Boston are not getting renovations right now, they have been taken care of very well over the years. Most of them seem to have been renovated between 2012 and 2018, so they're not that dated at all. That's certainly the case for Malden and this store, but of course, there are exceptions, and I'll be posting one of them soon enough.

Service seafood is gone here, though it was still up and running in Malden.

A part of the first aisle had been removed to make way for this Club Sizes section, obviously an attempt to compete with stores like BJ's and Costco. Although a similar program has shown up in most ShopRites, I haven't seen something like this in other Stop & Shops. There isn't a Costco or BJ's nearby, though.

A particularly nice meat department at the back of the store. I really like the curved wall here, and it's shown up in several other Stop & Shops.

As I mentioned in the Malden post, this decor package was the first one to see Stop & Shop removing separate natural and organic departments and integrating those into the rest of the store. Those sections continued to be called out in the aisles, though, with signage like this.

These freezers are probably original to the store.

Frozen and dairy in the last aisle. You can tell the remodel here was much more no-nonsense than the Malden one, which had quite a few more bells and whistles. But the bones are the same.

Bakery and pharmacy in the front-right corner.

Notice that this store is missing the slanted ceiling that runs along the perimeter of many stores of this era. The store I linked above in Worcester's Greendale neighborhood also doesn't have it and has the rounded meat department, while the Lincoln Plaza one doesn't have a rounded meat department but does have the slanted ceiling. In the bakery department and pharmacy, that meant a lower ceiling over this area with an angled wall. Meanwhile, East Meadow out on Long Island has the angled wall but not the slanted ceiling. But to my point about many of these stores being very similar: if you have to reach for specific ceiling patterns to find differences between the stores, there's almost nothing different about them.

And a look across the front-end...

There's one more supermarket in Lynn that we still have to visit, and that's a small store tucked away in a residential neighborhood of East Lynn. Come back tomorrow to see it!