One lone Target cart

One funny thing about this mall is that it has (well, had) at least four different businesses with carts. As you would expect, this led to random carts showing up at the wrong businesses. One thing I do to be less obvious with my photography is I almost always take a cart -- I was very tempted to use this one here, but I decided that might have the opposite effect of what I wanted! 🙂

Well, that's it for this Safeway. There are tons of reasons floating around of why it closed -- perhaps the mall wanted to kick it out (as AFB theorized), or maybe it hadn't been doing well for a while now (as Retail Retell thinks). Personally, my theory is that it's a late casualty of the Safeway-Albertsons merger. This store is a little under two miles away from the Eastgate store we saw last time (rather close out in this sort of sprawl-oriented development), and, while the two stores are similar in size and age, this one has a QFC, Walmart (non-Supercenter), and Target effectively right next to it. Sure, none of those are quite the same sort of thing, but I'm sure that combined, they draw off a good chunk of business from this store. Meanwhile, the closest competitor to the Eastgate store is actually this cluster of stores in Factoria, insulating it somewhat from competitive pressures. Without the merger, who knows which (if either) of the two would have survived long-term. As it is, I doubt the Eastgate store, at least, is going anywhere, and it should be healthier in the long term than this store ever was.