Close-up (ish)

There are some oddities in the design here (most notably, again, its presence in a strip mall, but also it just being a smaller store than normal), though I'm not sure how much of that is just because it's an early Marina store. Oh, and I keep talking about the Marina model as if everyone should know where that name came from -- it's named after the prototype, in the Marina neighborhood of San Francisco. I visited San Francisco once as a fairly young child, and our hotel was in this area so we shopped at that Safeway, and while I didn't know the significance at the time, I remember thinking it was a super cool store. (At that time, it still looked very original -- like this store -- but since then, it's sadly been "modernized" a bit on the outside.)

Oh, and one more note -- while this is in my "short post" slot, it's a bit of an exception there. This is the start of a series of 6 store sets (4 Safeways and 2 from a local chain that I'll discuss soon enough); each of the stores is a short post but I'll be on the general topic for a while now. Not that any of you really mind me messing with my formats, I suspect!