Original Stop & Shop Location

[josephineave.livejournal.com]

 I didn't realize until I saw this from the Herald that S&S started in Somerville.

"In its 94th year since the Rabinovitz family founded Economy Grocery Stores Co. in Somerville, the chain of 389 stores now known as Stop & Shop is refreshing its look."

Does anyone know where the original store was and/or where any of the other S&S stores were prior to the one they built at the old Somerville Lumber site?  

I find it odd they didn't have any Somerville locations for a number of years. 

Comments

[ron_newman]

When I first moved here, what's now AJ Wright on Somerville Avenue was a Stop & Shop store. In fact, that whole strip-mall was made up solely of stores owned by the Stop & Shop company: Bradlees, Medi Mart pharmacy, and the supermarket itself.

Over time, the supermarket closed and was replaced by Fretter Superstores (an electronics chain), then by AJ Wright. Bradlees closed and was replaced by Target. MediMart was sold to Walgreens, which kept this location for a while, but eventually closed it. Some auto parts store is there now.

[elbren]

In Cambridge, not Somerville, there used to be a grocery on Mem Drive, where the Microcenter is now, that I think was a S&S, but I'm not completely sure. (At the time the Trader Joes there was a Salvation Army.)

[boblothrope.livejournal.com]

http://pleasantfamilyshopping.blogspot.com/2008/01/early-days-of-stop-shop.html talks about Stop & Shop's early history and has some photos, though it doesn't give the exact location of the original store. It does say that the Memorial Drive location was the first self-service store. (Before there were supermarkets, at a grocery store the guy behind the counter would get you all the stuff you needed.)

The book "The Death of an American Jewish Community" says that the Rabinovitz brothers opened the first Economy Grocery Store in 1914 in Grove Hall (Roxbury/Dorchester), but that might be a mistake, since so many other sources on the web mention Somerville.