NORTH ANDOVER — Just inside the door, a shopper with sharp ears overhears a Market Basket manager referring to the store’s planned relocation here in the North Andover Mall.
The shopper, commanding a caged-steel grocery cart, steers straight for the manager in his signature red smock.
“Why are you moving?” she asks. More of a challenge than a question.
Customers sweep past in the aisle between the courtesy booth and 12-item Express Line.
Outside, a few hundred feet south in the mall’s mid-section, a crane plucks HVAC units from the roof.
Below, inside the former Kohl’s department store, a crew prepares the space for the future Market Basket site, expected to open about this time next year.
The supermarket and department store are swapping locations.
Meanwhile, the store manager calms the inquiring customer, explaining the move is for the best.
There is going to be more room, a new bakery, and a cafe.
It’s hard to imagine this public exchange playing out so freely at another supermarket chain.
But this is Market Basket.
Launched in 1917
The value-oriented New England institution, launched by Greek immigrants in 1917 as a small store in Lowell, now has 90 stores and a century of customer and employee loyalty, having sunk its commercial roots deeply into the Merrimack Valley.
Along the way, 10 years ago – nearly to the day in fact – a most curious set of events unfolded that still strikes awe in business college classes and brings amused smiles to the faces of those who had a hand in it.
On June 23, 2014, the Market Basket board fired CEO Arthur T. Demoulas, setting the stage for the “Summer of Market Basket.”
Here and elsewhere, thousands of Market Basket employees chanted slogans, toted protest signs — “No Artie T No MB” — and arranged shopping carts in parking lots to spell the initials ATD — expressing support for the deposed leader, known as Artie T.
Customers joined the picket line and protests, and they boycotted the store. Truck deliveries stopped, leading to bare coolers and shelves. Part-time workers were laid off.
Supervisors loyal to Artie T. were fired or resigned. Three of them, Tom Trainor, Tom Gordon and Steve Paulenka, joined the Bread and Roses wreath-laying ceremony at the Strikers’ Monument on Lawrence’s Campagnone Common later in the summer.
Parallels with the past
Local historians drew parallels between the Great Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912 and the Market Basket protests.
UMass Lowell professor Scott Latham, in the management department at the Manning School of Business, was riveted to the Market Basket saga, its twists and turns.
His expertise includes organizational decline and innovation. Like so many others, he worked at a Market Basket as a teen, in Billerica.
“We will never see anything like that again,” says Latham, who appears in the documentary film, “We the People: The Market Basket Effect,” narrated by actor Michael Chiklis, who was born in Lowell and grew up in Andover.
The protests coalesced under unique conditions, a confluence of factors and forces.
This was a longtime regional business, a family business, with an incredible business strategy and loyal customers, staff, and suppliers, Latham said.
The business strategy, which resonates with generations of New England shoppers, many of them working people, is delivering value.
For most of 2014 — both preceding and following the turmoil — Market Basket took 4% off every customer’s order, which people took notice of after the Great Recession.
Standing in solidarity
Elected officials also stood in solidarity with the Artie T. army.
The Eagle-Tribune and other media outlets delivered intense and ongoing coverage.
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In late August, protests ended when Arthur S. Demoulas and other shareholders agreed to sell their shares, 50.5%, to Arthur T. Demoulas for $1.5 billion. The deal became final that December.
Drexel University professor Daniel Korschun, in the LeBow College of Business, co-wrote a book on the unusual events, “We are Market Basket.”
He is surprised by how much interest there is in the story 10 years later.
“I still get asked to speak about it on podcasts and other events, and when I speak about it in class my students are transfixed,” he says.
Korschun sees the protests as part of a larger wave of customer and employee activism.
The Market Basket protest was a “stark example of customers, employees and others demanding that the company continue to be run in a way that benefitted them.”
Changes in North Andover
The coming North Andover store move, may, on a much smaller scale, be registering more than usual interest with local Market Basket shoppers because of their expectations and familiarity with the brand. Many of them remember the summer of 2014, as well.
Also, customers, especially families, working people and retirees, are seeking bargains in inflationary times, and want to know of any changes to their food supply.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, in the North Andover Mall parking lot, shoppers wanted to know particulars about the move.
Julie Mace and her daughter, Izzy, who live in Middleton, which also has a Market Basket, say they prefer the selection here in North Andover and that prices on some items are lower.
Julie Mace and several other customers wanted to know why the supermarket is moving within the same mall?
Market Basket representatives, who appeared before the North Andover Planning Board last winter, said Kohl’s did not want to renew its lease in the current space, but wanted a smaller space.
Stores swap spots
After Market Basket moves into its new location, Kohl’s and smaller specialty retail stores will occupy the vacant Market Basket space.
The representatives for Market Basket, which owns the North Andover strip mall and land, 41 acres, say the new store will be like other new ones, including the store on Pawtucket Boulevard in Lowell.
It has a Market’s Cafe, an expanded food prep location and a butcher shop.
“I hope that doesn’t change the prices,” Mace says.
Shopper Steve Cooper, of Andover, looks forward to the update.
He’s familiar with the new store in Salem, New Hampshire, and its selection of sandwiches.
Cooper has been living in Andover since 1978, about 10 years after the North Andover Mall was constructed in 1968. An outdoor movie theater, Den Rock Drive-In, stood on the site until 1966.
Market Basket has been at the mall since at least the 1970s.
North Andover’s Director of Planning Jean Enright, who grew up in town, says former mall tenants included Bradlees, the Pewter Pot restaurant and the Yum Yum Shop.
Consumers have questions
Another shopper in the parking lot, Jamal Tyler of North Andover who is a senior at UMass Lowell, was aware of the impending Market Basket move but wondered if the supermarket would shut down operations during the transition from one location to the other?
“Is it going to be closed for a little bit?” he asked.
People familiar with previous Market Basket relocations, similar to this one, say there will be no down time. The existing store will close one night and the new one will open the next morning.
Tyler was also curious about planned changes and disruptions to the parking lot.
The parking lot work takes place in phases, 10 of them, reducing disruptions.
The Market Basket representative told planners last winter, when the company received approval for modifications to the mall, that the work package included improvements to traffic flow, walkability, lighting and stormwater treatment, as well as a 102-space reduction in the number of parking places, from 1,011 to 909 spaces.
Major changes will include removal of parking lot pavement, creating more than an acre of open space bordering the stream on the property that runs parallel to Route 114.
New sidewalks along the ends will make the stores more inviting for walkers. A sidewalk along an island in the middle of the lot will connect walkers directly with the Market Basket.
Long interior landscaped islands every fourth parking row will discourage motorists from zipping across open parking spaces. Planning Board Chairman Eitan Goldberg says that right now there is nothing to stop traffic from cutting across the mall lot.
Traffic improvements coming
Curbing will be installed along the perimeter of the access drive, and new crosswalks, traffic control signage and striping are part of the plan, designed to improve traffic flow at the north and south ends, says the director of planning.
“At the southern exit it will no longer be a no-man’s land,” Enright said.
Back in the parking lot, while a crane lowers HVAC units onto a flatbed truck, a mom and her astonished 2-year-old son sit in their parked car, doors flung open, to watch the spectacle.
“Bonus points,” Lydia Akalov says.
They went shopping at Market Basket and, afterward, got to see some of the early preparations for the store’s move next year.
Market Basket remains a source of interest, and has survived with its business model intact; if anything, in a better position, says Latham.
“We have not seen anything like it since, in a decade,” Latham says. “It is a credit to Market Basket as a business and as a social institution in New England.”
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