Mega-vestibule

Stepping inside the first set of doors, I find myself in the weird lobby space, which feels more like a massive vestibule with the absolute lack of any furnishings or any other sort of reason for this space to exist. I imagine WeWork had some plans for this space when they were planning to take the entire building, but the continued presence of the "office space for lease" sign outside makes me assume that whole thing fell through.

Meanwhile, while it may not look so bad from this picture, I found the placement of the entrance doors completely unintuitive in person. I suspect they were placed to line up with the parking garage elevators (in that vestibule to the left), but entering from the main street entrance requires walking past the obvious part of the store, making a complete U-turn to go through the doors, and then making another U-turn to get in to the main portion of the store. (And the layout doesn't get any more intuitive past there, but we'll get to that later!) It seems like putting another set of doors where the carts are (between the checkout counter and the concrete column) would have made the whole place make much more sense, though admittedly I'm not sure where the carts would go if they did that. (Maybe in the giant, empty lobby? 🙂)