In the summer of 2019, I moved to Boston for a few months for a job. While I was there, I made it my mission to visit every supermarket in Boston -- which I did -- but I also branched out and visited stores in some of the suburbs like Brookline, Newton, Quincy, Malden, and a few others. The farthest I managed to make it outside of Boston (by train) is here, to Brockton, a city of a little over 100,000 people about 20 miles south of downtown Boston. I returned in the fall of 2022 to check out a few stores that opened, closed, or renovated. We'll be spending about a month touring the city from south to north, visiting almost every supermarket in town. There's quite a bit of grocery history here in Brockton -- what's today called Shaw's was originally Brockton Public Market, which they later rebranded as BPM Grocers. Shaw's history is quite interesting and a bid roundabout: per Wikipedia , George C. Shaw opened a store in 1860 in Portland, ME, and shortly thereafter a ...
Produce Barn Opened: 1978 Owner: unknown Previous Tenants: none Cooperative: none Location: 72 Mansfield Ave, Norton, MA Photographed: October 13, 2024 Welcome to the Produce Barn! It's one part hardware store, one part liquor store, one part grocery store all wrapped up in an 11,000 square foot building. We're going to focus on the grocery store part, which is in the middle of the building with hardware to the left and liquor to the right. The store opened in 1978, and a lot of it might be original (such as this produce case, perhaps, along with the grocery shelving). Despite the name, the produce department is quite small and limited to this one part of the first aisle. Butcher and deli are on the back wall, with dairy and frozen on the right side. There aren't a whole lot of grocery options in the immediate area, so this store probably fills a need for people who don't want to (or can't) travel about five miles to the next closest store. But within a co...