Shaw's - Colchester, VT

Shaw's
Opened: ca. late 1990s

Owner: Albertsons Companies

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: none

Location: 66 Mountain View Dr, Colchester, VT

Photographed: August 14, 2025

Welcome to The Market Report's final Vermont store! We're just north of the city of Burlington here in a suburb called Colchester to visit a Shaw's. This is not a particularly exciting store, although it does have some interesting quirks. So let's check it out!

Burnt-out "a" aside, this store is in great shape despite not getting a major remodel for some time. You enter via this impressive atrium on the right side of the store, which brings you into the grand aisle.

Floral is up front, with prepared foods and deli in an island facing produce on the right side wall. Bakery, meat, and seafood counters are at the back, with meat lining the rest of the back wall. Frozen and dairy are on the left side, with pharmacy and health and beauty in the front-left corner.

So we're seeing a mashup of two different decor packages here, the Premium Fresh & Healthy 1.0 decor -- see here -- and the more recent decor package, which was kind of installed around that existing decor, not instead of it. We've seen something like this before, but this Colchester store is looking much better than that Milford one. In fact, it's hardly noticeable that there are multiple generations of decor here, because the flooring and fixtures have been replaced recently. The rest has been kept up extremely well.

You'll see almost nobody in these pictures, and that's because I was here pretty late at night, shortly before the store closed. I don't know whether this is a high-volume store, but it must do at least decently well to have gotten several renovations over the years and be looking this good for a store that's over 70,000 square feet, or very large for Shaw's.

It looks like there was previously a natural foods department in the first few aisles here, which has now been removed. New aisle markers, but the flooring remains.

My best guess is that this store was probably built with this decor in the late 1990s, then remodeled extensively around 2008.

These fixtures haven't been replaced, and the freezers and refrigeration look to be on the older side. Meanwhile, it looks like a lot of the fixtures in the grand aisle have been redone.

Health and beauty are in a few short aisles up by the pharmacy in the front.

There are a few signs that this store is a bit big for Shaw's, such as this double-wide aisle which probably previously was a regular grocery aisle. Many of these late 90s/early 00s Shaw's -- like several other chains -- had extensive selections of nonfoods that were later pared down or removed.

And that actually brings us to the end of our visit to the Green Mountain State! Thanks for taking a look around Vermont with me, and now tomorrow is a very exciting day. Come back for another 10th year special feature!