The Market Report

Market Basket Opened: early 1970s Owner:  DeMoulas family Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  399 John Fitch Hwy, Fitchburg, MA Photographed:  April 7, 2023 Ah, Market Basket. How New Englanders love thee. And one of Market Basket's strengths is consistency -- no matter how old the stores are, they all look basically the same and they're maintained exceptionally well. Plus, the majority of the stores have been opened, rebuilt, or expanded within the last 20 years or so. They have an incredibly consistent store fleet for a chain of around 100 supermarkets (and counting). So today's tour is something highly unusual: a Market Basket that hasn't been touched much since its opening in the early 1970s. It's received a small expansion, no later than 1985, out the right side (and in fact, you can just barely make out a slight difference in the tones of brick on the right in the below picture). Today, it's a little shy of 40,000 square feet -- very, ve...

Market Basket Opened: ca. 1990 Owner:  DeMoulas family Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  130 Water St, Fitchburg, MA Photographed:  April 7, 2023 This is a relatively older Market Basket, but of course, within Market Basket everything is relative. This store only goes back about 30 years (possibly slightly more, but it opened as a new-build around 1990 on the side of a former mill building). Still, the 62,000 square foot supermarket is the newer of the two Market Baskets in Fitchburg. Also of note: Fitchburg has only two supermarkets, and both are Market Baskets. Leominster, just south, has two Hannafords , a Market Basket , and a natural food store . There's another Hannaford right outside Fitchburg, which we'll see shortly. In a typical Market Basket layout, dairy is in the first aisle on the right side. Seafood and deli are at the back of the first aisle, with meat on the rest of the back wall. Produce and frozen are on the left side with...

Lopez Market Opened: 2021 Owner:  Mario Lopez Contreras Previous Tenants:  Romano's Market (1903-2020) Cooperative:  none Location:  138 Harvard St, Fitchburg, MA Photographed:  April 7, 2023 Romano's Market stood on the corner of Harvard and Fulton Streets in a residential neighborhood of Fitchburg for over 100 years. It opened back in 1903, staying in business all the way through 2020. Here's an article from the local paper on the store's closure (behind a paywall), a column in the Telegram & Gazette about it, and a picture of Romano's shortly after it closed. But the tiny, 1200 square foot store is still operating as a grocery store -- now as Lopez Market, which opened in 2021. Inside, it looks a lot like Romano's did , and it's seriously old-school but seems to be kept up nicely. We're a couple blocks outside of downtown Fitchburg here, but there's a large supermarket right in the middle of Fitchburg we're touring tomorrow!

Original Grocery Tenant: unknown Address: 1334 Water St, Fitchburg, MA Opened:  unknown Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  Caribbean International Market (1996-ca. 2017) Photographed:  April 7, 2023 About half a mile north of yesterday's Hannaford is this former corner grocer, which operated from 1996 until about 2017 as the Caribbean International Market. The store was just 2300 square feet, and judging by the look of it, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a grocer for many decades before Caribbean International Market was here. So far, it's been vacant since Caribbean International moved out. Tomorrow we're heading up towards downtown Fitchburg for a similar small store that's still in business!

Would you believe that even though we're nearing the border of New Hampshire, and most of what we just passed through was forests, mountains, and reservoirs, we're still within Worcester County? We're about 20 miles north of Worcester here -- a long way in a small state -- to visit the Montachusett Region, the area surrounding Fitchburg, which is the largest city in this area. Leominster (pronounced Lemon-ster) is about eight miles north of Clinton , where we saw several stores over the last few days . We're going to start near the southern end of Leominster, then move north through the town before we cross into Fitchburg for a few more stores. Then we'll go just northeast of Fitchburg to make one stop in the small town of Lunenburg. There aren't a whole lot of stores up here, so we won't spend that long in this area, just about two and a half weeks. And once we're done with that, it's off east to the Lowell area. In the meantime, have a good weeken...