Nearly two years after the Stop & Shop at 545 Lincoln St. in Worcester went dark, the massive storefront is filling up again — this time with skeletons, fog machines, and racks of costumes. Workers have been spotted covering the windows with pictures of children in costumes and hanging black-and-orange decorations as Spirit Halloween prepares to move into the vacant supermarket space in Worcester's Lincoln Plaza.
The seasonal retailer plans to open its doors sometime in August 2026, according to the Spirit Halloween website, though as MassLive reports, an exact opening date has not been provided. The Stop & Shop that once occupied the site closed for good on October 31, 2024, after operating in Lincoln Plaza for more than two decades, according to CBS News. The closure was part of a company-wide shutdown of 32 underperforming stores across five states.
Parent company Ahold Delhaize said the decision to shut down the Lincoln Street store, along with locations in Brockton, Raynham, Halifax, Shrewsbury, Newton, Springfield and Pembroke, was part of an effort to improve the supermarket chain's overall performance, the outlet's report notes. In Worcester alone, the Lincoln Plaza location was one of eight Massachusetts stores swept up in the closures.
A Fight City Officials Ultimately Lost
The closure did not happen without pushback. Worcester city officials made efforts to get Stop & Shop to reconsider, and in July 2024, District 1 City Councilor Jenny Pacillo introduced a formal city council order asking municipal leadership to meet with Stop & Shop executives, according to The Worcester Guardian. Pacillo argued that local residents deserved walkable access to fresh, healthy groceries, the outlet reported. Those efforts went nowhere, and the store closure proceeded despite the city's intervention.
The Worcester Housing Authority had also sounded the alarm months earlier. In July 2024, the authority warned that losing the Lincoln Street Stop & Shop would disproportionately hurt low-income families in the adjacent Great Brook Valley Gardens and Curtis Apartments, many of whom lacked private vehicles and relied on walking or bus access to reach the supermarket, per a statement covered by This Week in Worcester.
The closure also drew scrutiny from Massachusetts' congressional delegation. In October 2024, U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey joined other federal lawmakers in sending a letter to Ahold Delhaize demanding answers over allegations of predatory pricing and price gouging in working-class neighborhoods ahead of the shutdowns, according to the Worcester Business Journal. The lawmakers cited a youth investigation that found higher grocery prices in lower-income areas compared with affluent suburbs.
Leftover Groceries Went to the Food Bank
When the store finally closed, its remaining non-perishable and frozen inventory did not go to waste. Stop & Shop transferred those goods to the Worcester County Food Bank to support local hunger-relief efforts, part of a broader partnership the chain had with regional food banks across the Northeast, according to WGBH's reporting at the time.
That still left a gap in the neighborhood's day-to-day grocery access. With the Lincoln Street store gone, Stop & Shop's Worcester footprint shrank to two locations, at 940 West Boylston St. and 949 Grafton St. An Aldi store at 500 Lincoln St., directly across the street, remains the closest grocery alternative, though city officials have noted that while Aldi offers lower-cost items, it lacks the full-service selection of a traditional supermarket.
A National Chain Moves Into a Big Empty Box
The 545 Lincoln St. building itself is no small space — it spans nearly 60,000 square feet within Lincoln Plaza, an open-air shopping center totaling more than 538,000 square feet anchored by tenants including Target, Lowe's, TJ Maxx and HomeGoods. That kind of vacant big-box footprint is exactly what Spirit Halloween looks for each year.
The seasonal retailer typically signs temporary three-month leases running from mid-July through mid-November, targeting vacant spaces between 5,000 and 50,000 square feet in high-traffic shopping centers, according to CoStar. Landlords often use these short-term Halloween pop-ups to offset holding costs on empty big-box storefronts while they search for permanent tenants.
Spirit Halloween, founded in 1983 and owned by parent company Spencer Spirit Holdings, now operates more than 1,500 seasonal pop-up stores across the United States and Canada each year, hiring roughly 50,000 temporary workers for the fall season, per Blue Triangle. Hoodline recently reported on a possible $350 million mall-goth mega deal involving the chain's parent company, and the seasonal brand has also branched into winter territory with its Spirit Christmas concept.
The scale of that business reflects a broader surge in Halloween spending nationally. Consumer spending on the holiday reached an estimated record $13.1 billion in 2025, with costume spending alone rising to $4.3 billion, according to the National Retail Federation. Per-person Halloween spending hit an all-time high of $114.45 that year, the trade group found.
For now, the transformation underway at 545 Lincoln St. is a familiar late-summer ritual for shopping centers around the country: a vacant supermarket dressed up in fog and fake cobwebs for a few months. But for residents of Great Brook Valley Gardens and Curtis Apartments who once walked to that building for their weekly groceries, the seasonal costume shop arriving in its place is a reminder of what the neighborhood still does not have.
