6 Market Basket Changes Massachusetts Shoppers Still Aren’t Over
Some Market Basket changes still sting.
Others just make longtime shoppers feel old, in a good way.
These are the Market Basket changes Massachusetts shoppers still aren’t over.
1. Six Weeks Without Deliveries
Market Basket customers still bring up June 23, 2014, the day the board fired Arthur T. Demoulas as president and two other executives.
Warehouse and office workers stopped showing up within days.
Delivery trucks stopped pulling into stores, and shelves went empty across Massachusetts.
A customer boycott grew alongside the walkout.
Nobody expected it to work.
It did.
On August 27, Demoulas and his sisters agreed to buy out their cousin’s side of the family for $1.5 billion, and he walked back into the company that had just thrown him out.
2. Discount That Vanished
Market Basket shoppers got a rare bonus in January 2014, a 4 percent discount on most purchases meant to cushion high energy costs and cuts to food stamp benefits.
Some shoppers assumed it would stick around for good.
The company always planned to end it.
It disappeared on December 27, 2014, right after the boycott ended and Demoulas was back in charge.
Then the receipts changed.
A year later, consumer advocate Edgar Dworsky found Market Basket’s prices on a sample of items had risen 9 percent, and he traced about half of that increase straight to the missing discount.
3. Fired a Second Time
Market Basket’s board suspended Arthur T. Demoulas again in May 2025, this time investigating whether he was planning another work stoppage to save his job.
By September, the board voted to fire him.
No mass walkout followed this time.
Warehouse workers stayed on the job, and the aisles stayed full.
Many shoppers still took a side.
A Boston Globe reader survey found 86 percent opposed the firing.
Another 61 percent said they’d consider a boycott.
In April 2026, a Delaware judge called Demoulas “imperious” while upholding the firing and denying his request to get his job back.
He chose not to appeal.
Two months later, the fight was over, on paper.
4. Who Takes Over Next
One fight at Market Basket never made headlines the way the firing did.
It’s about who runs the company next.
Board members told Demoulas in August 2024 that leadership wouldn’t automatically pass to his children.
He wanted his daughter, Madeline, and his son, T.A., to take over.
The board said no.
Board member Steven Collins has pointed out that Market Basket is already in its third generation of Demoulas ownership.
Very few family businesses make it to a fourth.
Neither side has said publicly what happens next.
For a company that’s stayed in the same family since 1917, that’s still an open question customers want answered.
Psst! How much do you know about the history behind America’s grocery stores? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
Grocery Store Trivia
Answer these questions on the supermarkets, gadgets, and gimmicks that shaped how America shops. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
Which Tennessee grocer opened America’s first true self-service grocery store in 1916, letting shoppers pick items off the shelves themselves for the first time?
5. Your Dollar Buys Less
Market Basket still wins most price comparisons across Massachusetts, but your grocery budget doesn't go as far as it used to.
Grocery prices in the Boston area rose 24 percent between June 2019 and June 2025, more than four times the 5 percent rise across the six years before that.
Consumer advocate Edgar Dworsky put it plainly in 2025, saying Market Basket isn't the bargain destination it used to be, mostly because of inflation.
A Globe price test that year still put Market Basket on top overall, cheapest of five Massachusetts grocery chains on a ten-item list.
The full basket at Market Basket rang up to $38.28, beating the runner-up by close to two dollars and Whole Foods by nearly twelve.
The savings is real.
It's just smaller than it used to be.
6. Bigger Chain, Same Crowds
Market Basket started as one grocery store in Lowell in 1917, when Greek immigrants Athanasios and Efrosini Demoulas began selling lamb, pork, and sausage to their own immigrant neighborhood.
It's now a four-state chain, with more than 90 stores across Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island.
The company crossed into New Hampshire in 1964 and didn't open a Maine store until 2013, in Biddeford.
The crowds never thinned out.
Longtime store director Ron Lambert put it simply in a 2015 case study: "We're going to win in volume. We always win in volume."
More stores mean more of the same jammed aisles, not fewer.
A Tuesday afternoon run can still take twice as long as it should.
A Fan Ran the Website
Market Basket had no official website for years, deep into the internet era.
A shopper stepped in.
Michael Devaney started MyDeMoulas.com after he couldn't find his local store's hours anywhere online.
The site grew to more than a million visitors a month.
He scanned in the weekly circular himself and posted it before the company ever did.
During the 2014 crisis, Devaney logged 37,000 emails in one weekend, most of them meant for a company that had never built its own site.
No Self-Checkout, Ever
One thing at Market Basket hasn't budged through any of it.
The chain has never installed a single self-checkout lane, in any store, in any state.
Arthur T. Demoulas calls that a philosophy, not an oversight.
He traces it back to the founding family's own pledge that a good grocery store means "a human being waiting on a human being."
No exceptions.
Every register still has a person standing behind it, ringing up whatever's in the cart, the same as it did in 1917.
12 Things Bay Staters Say That Confuse the Rest of America
Say "wicked" outside Massachusetts, and most people guess it's a joke from an old sitcom.
It's not, and eleven other phrases mark a true Bay Stater just as fast, whether they grew up in Boston or out past Worcester.
