This store was built in 1967, towards the end of Safeway's Marina era, and I suspect it stayed as a Safeway until a new one was built next door in 1990. Thankfully, this store has remained largely intact since then, and I suspect it's been a Big Lots for much of that time.
Most likely this was either a MacFrugal's or Pic n' Save prior to Big Lots, as Big Lots bought out those two chains in the late 90's, which got them into the western part of the US.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I honestly had never heard of MacFrugal's before!
DeleteI believe Pic-N-Save and MacFrugal's were two brands of the same company. Here in Houston, we started out with Pic-N-Save in the late 1980s. The company then renamed those stores to the MacFrugal's name in the early 1990s. This is a little unclear to me, but it seems that some stores in certain parts of the western US may have kept the Pic-N-Save name instead of adopting the MacFrugal's name. I'm not totally sure about that.
DeleteAnyway, the parent company behind Big Lots ended up taking over the Pic-N-Save/MacFrugal's chain and so our MacFrugal's stores were renamed Big Lots in the very late 1990s/very early 2000s. There is one vestige of MacFrugal's which remains here in Houston though. We have a shopping center, the North Oaks Mall, that was more or less a traditional shopping center, but it had a small mall corridor in it that operated in the 1970s-early 1990s. Eventually, the mall corridor was mostly closed and the shopping center has purely operated as a regular shopping center/powercenter since then. However, there is an extremely retro dollar theater in the center of the shopping center, but it's kind of in the back of the shopping center. Thus, a small part of the mall corridor remains that leads people to the theater.
Well, the Big Lots in that shopping center is on the small mall corridor that remains. There is a mall entrance to the Big Lots, but it hasn't been used in years. Thus, Big Lots never removed the MacFrugal's signage that is over the mall entrance. AFAIK, that MacFrugal's sign is still hanging on the side of the Big Lots even ~20 years after the MacFrugal's name was discontinued! Je of the Louisiana & Texas Retail blog has some photos of the MacFrugal's sign and the shopping center itself: https://southernretail.blogspot.com/search/label/North%20Oaks%20Mall
As for the Lynnwood Big Lots, that's a pretty neat looking Big Lots. It seems like each Big Lots is quite unique and retains many characteristics from past tenants. In this case, the Safeway Marina look is maintained. I'm glad you were able to share this location. As I mentioned in a comment on the My Florida Retail blog recently, I'm glad that retail bloggers are starting to pay more attention to Big Lots locations because there are a lot of great little bits of retail history in their stores.