The Market Report

Trader Joe's Opened: November 2024 Owner:  ALDI Nord Previous Tenants:  Staples Cooperative:  none Location:  230 Fortune Blvd, Milford, MA Photographed:  August 24, 2025 In a way, Trader Joe's stores are like Market Basket stores -- it's hard to tell exactly how old they are from just looking at them since they tend to use a timeless design that's relatively consistent across the stores. So I was surprised to find that this Trader Joe's in Milford is still very new, having only opened in November of 2024 (I visited in August 2025, so shortly thereafter). The approximately 20,000 square foot store occupies a former Staples in a mall north of downtown Milford. This is only the second Trader Joe's in Worcester County (the first was out in Shrewsbury ); there are 25 Trader Joe's across Massachusetts. You enter to the produce department on the left side of the store, with cheeses and deli across the back wall. Frozen foods are in the middle of the store, with ...

Trader Joe's Opened: ca. 2000 Owner:  Aldi Nord Previous Tenants:  unknown Cooperative:  none Location:  145 Great Rd, Acton, MA Photographed:  May 20, 2025 Welcome back to Acton! On our first pass through town, we saw almost every supermarket in town. Check out the old and new Stop & Shop , the Roche Brothers , Idylwilde Farms , Mei Ya , and Donelan's . But we missed one store: this Trader Joe's, which takes up about 13,000 square feet on the southeastern side of town. Inside, it's a pretty standard Trader Joe's. Produce is on the left side, with dairy and cheese on the back wall. Frozen foods are in the middle, with meat and nonfoods in the last aisle. The grocery aisles run diagonally across the middle of the store, with frozen foods in the middle. This was one of the relatively early Trader Joe's in the Boston area, opening around 2000. The first stores in the Boston area opened in Cambridge and Brookline in 1996. Upright and single-tier frozen foods...

Trader Joe's Opened: 1996 Owner:  Aldi Nord Previous Tenants:  unknown Cooperative:  none Location:  748 Memorial Dr, Cambridge, MA Photographed:  October 4 and 5, 2018 Welcome to the Cambridge Trader Joe's! Actually, this is one of two, with the other one way up at Alewife. This 11,000 square foot supermarket was one of the earliest Boston-area Trader Joe's, opening in 1996 around the time the Brookline store opened. It's just around the corner from the Whole Foods we saw yesterday. I love the mural-covered wall, a very nice touch on what would otherwise be a fairly typical strip mall building. I haven't been inside the store, though, but you can take a look inside here . It's just next door to a building now home to the Micro Center , an electronics store, but it was originally a Stop & Shop. Here's a closeup of the mural on the side wall of the store, which faces Memorial Drive. And that's a wrap on Cambridge and Somerville! Come back tomorrow...

Trader Joe's Opened: 2009 Owner:  Aldi Nord Previous Tenants:  A&P > ? > CVS Cooperative:  none Location:  211 Alewife Brook Pkwy, Cambridge, MA Photographed:  July 27, 2019 Today's Trader Joe's sure looks like any other Trader Joe's and doesn't seem particularly notable inside or outside. Don't be fooled: this 15,000 square foot store is actually built into part of a former A&P centennial. Constructed in the early 1960s by A&P, the space later was subdivided. By the mid-1980s, the right side had become a Heartland Drug, a chain that CVS later acquired. A Newbury Comics store was next to it in the other half of the former A&P. In 2009, CVS moved into the Newbury Comics space and expanded out the left side of the building, leaving space for Trader Joe's in part of the original A&P. Trader Joe's opened in 2009. The layout is pretty straightforward, with produce on the left side, dairy at the back, meat and cheese/deli in the back...

Trader Joe's Opened: 2017 Owner:  Aldi Nord Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  199 N Harvard St, Allston, MA Photographed:  July 27, 2019 Welcome to Lower Allston, which (as I mentioned on the preview post for this neighborhood ) is paradoxically the northern part of Allston. This Trader Joe's is also our final store post in the city of Boston! This Trader Joe's opened in 2017 in a newly-built mixed use development. It's 13,000 square feet. Inside, the store feels a lot like any other Trader Joe's, with the produce department on the right side, meats in the back-right corner, cheese/deli at the back, frozen in the middle, and nonfoods on the left side. I was a bit surprised to see that the store has a somewhat low ceiling (and I think the low-hanging lights and unusually large number of pipes and ducts running across the ceiling doesn't help). You get the feeling of a basement store , although you're on the ground floor here, not below s...