The Market Report

Original Grocery Tenant:  Price Chopper Address:  50 Cambridge St, Worcester, MA Opened:  2003 Closed:  January 2025 Later Tenants:  vacant Photographed:  March 26, 2025 It's time to return to the Main & Cambridge Price Chopper, which closed at the end of January . The massive, 70,000 square foot store was built from the ground up in 2003, replacing an older store just north. The space remains vacant with several Price Chopper remnants around the property, although the signage has all been removed from the building itself. But Price Chopper banners remain in the parking lot, as do the cart corrals. Price Chopper said at the time of closure that they were looking for someone to sublet from them for the last several years on their lease -- nobody seems interested yet, although as I no longer live in Worcester I don't have my ear to the ground the way I used to -- and, as a result, it seems like everything has been left completely as-is. The Price Chopper...

Shaw's Opened: 2005 Owner:  Albertsons Companies Previous Tenants:  Zayre Cooperative:  none Location:  68 Stafford St, Worcester, MA Photographed:  January 13, 2025 As the Price Chopper just east prepares to close , the Shaw's at Webster Square Plaza has finished a reset. I was hoping they'd also remodel the store, but they haven't. The nearly 80,000 square foot store, located in a former Zayre department store, is clearly too big for Shaw's, as they've reduced the store in every way they can without actually shrinking the footprint. The perimeter and service departments don't seem to have changed, but the grocery aisles certainly have. In the first few aisles, the separated natural foods and international foods departments have been removed, with the selections integrated into the rest of the store. (You can see how it previously was set up in my original tour here .) The different-colored flooring remains, though... But the selection across the store has...

Price Chopper Opened: 2003 Owner:  Northeast Grocery Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  50 Cambridge St, Worcester, MA Photographed:  January 13, 2025 Welcome back to the Main & Cambridge Price Chopper, a 70,000 square foot store built in 2003 replacing an acquired Big D under a mile north. Like Gala Foods and Shaw's , I shopped here regularly when I lived in Worcester, and you can see all of my previous pictures here . Earlier this month, Price Chopper announced the store would be closed by January 31 . This comes as a Stop & Shop on the north end of the city closed last fall. I'd long suspected that this store wasn't going to be around much longer, and it's obvious investment in the store stopped several years ago. But there are a few things that make this closure particularly interesting. For one, the property is actually owned by the New York City-based Red Apple Group, the same company that owns Gristedes and D'Agostino superm...

Now it's time to see some of the smaller grocers in the Webster Square and Main South area. A note on historical sources:  To get "past stores" in each location, I've consulted Worcester city directories going back to the 1910s. Here in the city, I'm drawing from  1916, 1922, 1927, 1931, 1937, 1943, 1959, 1952, 1957, 1962, 1969, 1973, 1979, 1985, 1991, 2000, 2009, and 2017.  Also of note: this is far from an exhaustive listing of all grocery stores that have been in this area, although I'll probably eventually post the full thing, this is just what I've been able to photograph. Reading the captions:  A caption such as the following...          |  John Smith (1926-1937) > Joe Jones (1955-1982) ...means that John Smith appears in the directories in 1926 and 1937, and Joe Jones appears in all directories I consulted between 1955 and 1982. That doesn't mean that John Smith opened up shop in 1926 and closed in 1937, he might have started i...

Asian Supermarket Owner: Lan Heung Ha Opened:  2017 Cooperative:  none Location:  50 Mill St, Webster Square, Worcester, MA Photographed:  August 28, 2018; September 19, 2018; and September 3, 2021 It's not uncommon to see an Asian supermarket set up shop in a former big-chain supermarket location -- and this building was a Stop & Shop -- but what's interesting is that Stop & Shop closed long before Asian Supermarket opened, and there was at least one other tenant in between. In this case, it was a thrift store, meaning that Asian Supermarket had to completely re-outfit the roughly 21,000 square foot space when they opened. Here we can see the clear original Stop & Shop building, and how Asian Supermarket takes up the left portion of the arched roof building along with the expansion out the left side. Savers, the thrift store previously occupying this space (which also occupies several other former supermarkets in the area), closed up shop around 2015, ...