Rhode Island has one of the country’s most consolidated grocery markets, and officials say Woonsocket’s roughly 45,000 residents have a single full-scale supermarket in city limits. The new law removes one private barrier to competitors opening at former store sites — but only for restrictions created after June 18.
Eighteen months. That’s the longest a supermarket chain in Rhode Island can now keep a competitor off a former store site — and only if it clears five other conditions written into the statute.
That number is the heart of the law Gov. Dan McKee signed on June 18, which took effect the moment he put his name to it. The bill, S 2644, makes most new grocery-related restrictive covenants void and unenforceable in Rhode Island. A restrictive covenant, in this context, is a recorded or contractual limit on how a piece of land can be used — the kind that can follow a property through a sale and tell the next owner what they may not do with it. Applied to a shuttered supermarket, it can say: no one sells groceries here…