The Market Report

Big Y World Class Market Owner: D'Amour family Opened: November 3, 2011 Previous Tenants:  none Location:  10 Pleasant St, Lee, MA Photographed:  June 10, 2022 And it's time for our first Big Y tour here in Massachusetts! Big Y is a family-owned chain based in Springfield of around 75 stores. It dates back to 1936, when Charles D'Amour opened the Y Cash Market at a y-intersection in Chicopee. This store was a new-build in 2011, and it seems to have been renovated fairly recently before I visited. The store has a layout pretty similar to most Big Y stores. They have stores across Massachusetts and Connecticut and cover a pretty wide geographic area, stretching from basically Boston suburbs in the northeast to Bridgeport suburbs in the southwest. Their home base and strongest area is in the Springfield and western Massachusetts area. This is a variation on the latest Big Y decor package, which as you might notice is not that different from the Inserra decor , for inst...

Original Grocery Tenant: Price Chopper Address: 88 W Park St, Lee, MA Opened:  unknown Closed:  2017 Later Tenants:  vacant Photographed:  May 28, 2021 Welcome to Massachusetts! Our first stop is in the far western part of the state, in the Berkshires. We're not quite 10 miles east from the New York border. This building of around 17,000 square feet was a Price Chopper until 2017, when the small-format store closed. In fact, Price Chopper used this as one of a group of test stores for this smaller format setup back in the 1980s-90s or so. I don't know if it's been a Price Chopper for its whole life. The supermarket has, to my knowledge, remained vacant since it closed. I don't think anything has happened with it. In fact, when I visited in 2021, it still looked like the store had just recently closed. The store was cleaned out, though. The fixtures were probably sent to other stores or sold. Price Chopper signage remained around the store! The property is set to be...