The long-running Demoulas family squabble, in which two branches of a Lowell family (one of them originally headed by a man named Telemachus, who disappointingly preferred to be called Mike) battle for control of a supermarket empire, has been appealed to the Supreme Court. That gives Bostonist a good opportunity to wax poetic about the actual subject matter of the dispute, Market Basket grocery stores. Bostonist loves Market Basket above all other supermarkets and wants nothing more than to win converts, no matter the outcome of the lawsuit. Why? Because a trip to our local Somerville store never fails to entertain and excite. The place is always impossibly full of people, abuzz with happy family energy and inexplicably harmonious: although shopping cart gridlock regularly makes the checkout lanes look like the Sagamore Bridge rotary on a Friday afternoon, tempers rarely heat up; Haitian grandmas coo in Creole at Brazilian babies while their parents ask questions in Portuguese and the employees respond in Spanish; old ladies speaking languages Bostonist can't even recognize ask for help retrieving products from high shelves. It is one of the few places where the jolly, no-big-deal multiculturalism of public television cartoons is a reality, proving what Woodrow Wilson said when he first proposed the League of Nations: All peoples can come together in peace for low prices and good produce. (OK, maybe he didn't say that, but he would have if he'd been to Somerville.)
And the prices really are good. Bostonist routinely gets double the amount of food for the same price we might spend at our local Shaw's, and we don't even have to remember that card. (And don't even get us started on the prices at Whole Foods!) Add to that the good selection, including the availability of many strange and exciting fruits and roots, and a Goya products section bigger than some towns in New Hampshire, and we can understand why someone might wage one of the longest legal battles in Massachusetts history to control this place ($1.5 billion doesn't hurt either).
Contributed by Josh Michtom
Photo courtesy of flickr.com/Jason Brackins


