The Market Report

Market Basket Opened: 2011, replacing older store on property Owner:  DeMoulas family Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  1201 Bridge St, Lowell, MA Photographed:  August 23, 2025 Happy Monday! Just a couple blocks east of the Dracut Hannaford is the final Market Basket in Lowell we haven't yet seen -- Store #2, in fact. We saw Store #1 (and stores #19 and #88 ) last week. I mentioned Chelmsford is Store #4, and so after some digging I found that store #3 was actually down in Wilmington , about 12 miles southeast. #5 was up in Lawrence, and... you know what, I'm writing this at 11 pm on a Thursday. I should stop with the rabbit hole. So although this was one of the early locations, that doesn't mean (by Market Basket's numbering scheme) this actual building was the second Market Basket. This 67,000 square foot store, in fact, only opened in 2011, replacing an older store in the strip mall when it was constructed on the site of a closed Ame...

Hannaford Opened: 1997 Owner:  Ahold Delhaize Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  301 Pleasant St, Dracut, MA Photographed:  August 23, 2025 Welcome to the Dracut Hannaford! Lowell is Market Basket territory without a doubt, and all four large supermarkets in the city are Market Baskets. (See Wood Street , Old Ferry Road , and Fletcher Street ; Bridge Street is coming on Monday.) But just outside Lowell is the smaller town of Dracut, which has only one store in town and it's a Hannaford. We're about four miles northeast of the Hannaford in Chelmsford here, and these are very similar stores today. That one was built as an Alexander's Supermarket, a chain based in New Hampshire that had several locations in Massachusetts. (We're just two miles from the New Hampshire border at this store, by the way.) Here, Alexander's constructed a store on the property in the late 1960s. Hannaford bought it in 1990, but in 1997 or 1998, demolished the original...

Market Basket Opened:  1997 Owner:  DeMoulas family Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  331 Fletcher St, Lowell, MA Photographed:  August 23, 2025 It wouldn't be accurate to say that this is the original Market Basket. It's not: this 43,000 square foot store was only constructed in the late 1990s, taking up a full city block in The Acre, a neighborhood near downtown Lowell with a historically large Greek population. But the Demoulas' original grocery store was located in a since-demolished building on Dummer Street, just four blocks away from here. The original Demoulas store was a " grocerette " at 93 Dummer Street, a building that no longer exists. In 1950, the business became the Demoulas Superette at 80 Dummer Street, across the street. That 80 Dummer location stayed in business all the way through 1997, per Groceteria  and Market Basket , though it was renovated and expanded many times. In 1997, this store was constructed, replac...