NASHUA – The new Market Basket at Somerset Plaza will open at 7 a.m. this coming Sunday, June 23, barely 12 hours after the older Market Basket at the other end of the plaza closes its doors on Saturday.

The new store will be significantly bigger than the old one: 84,000 square feet vs. 59,000 square feet. It will have around 350 employees, about 20 percent of whom work full-time, said David McLean, operations manager for the Demoulas Market Basket company.

The new store will have sit-down cafe with free
Wi-Fi, and specialty meat service, similar to that in a new Market Basket that opened two months ago in Bedford.

The older Somerset Plaza grocery store opened in 1989. The new store was just built to replace a Sears Essentials that shut last year. Demoulas owns the Somerset Plaza.

McLean said there are no formal plans about what will replace the old Market Basket.

Earlier this month, Market Basket shut down an even older and smaller (roughly 30,000 square feet) store a mile east, at Turnpike Plaza. No plans have been announced about what will happen there.

McLean said no layoffs were involved with the changes, as all the employees at the closed stores have been hired at other stores.

“We are trying to take all of our stores and invest in newer facilities, new departments, especially healthier lines, the growth of organics,” McLean said.

There are 29 Market Baskets in New Hampshire, including a south Nashua store that has been open since 1969. There are 69 Market Basket stores throughout New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine.

Duxbury, Mass.-based Market Basket has been on a roll in recent years in sharp comparison to New England competitors like Shaw’s, which laid off some 700 employees across New England last winter.

Market Basket’s 2012 sales were about $3.5 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

David Brooks can be reached at 594-6531 or dbrooks@nashua
telegraph.com. Also, follow Brooks on Twitter (@GraniteGeek).