One amusing note about this store's history is that the 90s are now as far away as the 60s were when this store was remodeled! Admittedly, the store's construction was in the late 60s, and I suspect the remodel was in the mid-late 90s, but still. At least in my opinion, it seems like there were a lot of developments in retail (and grocery in particular) between the 60s and the 90s, and not all that many between the 90s and the 2020s, but maybe I'm way off with that and I'd love to hear what you all think! Also of note is the highly interesting -- probably unique -- Safeway sign, featuring tiny, non-illuminated letters in a very widely-spaced serif font that doesn't match any Safeway logo, with extremely low-contrast "food & drug' lettering below (which you might be able to see if you zoom way in on this picture; otherwise, it's somewhat more visible in
Street View).
Are you referring to design-wise, or just new retail build-up in general? Because if it's the latter, then it surely just depends on the location; my area, for example, only began to really start hopping in the 90s and 00s (and continuing today, even, as you head toward the edges of the county). Design-wise, I'm sure there have been plenty of developments as well, but that's such a broad question that I wouldn't even know where to begin in answering it, haha!
ReplyDeleteFor some reason the wordmark logo on the building here actually doesn't look too unusual to me; the font looks like the 90s logo (perhaps it's not, but it just looks that way to me), and the spacing reminds me of really old Safeways -- at least, the one I intend to write a blog post on at some point in the future had a very spaced-out wordmark like that.
Also, even though I was barely around in the 90s, I still didn't need to hear that comparison of the distance from the 60s to the 90s and the 90s to today XD
I'm mostly talking in terms of retail concepts and design -- though, that being said, the reason that it might feel like that to me is that there hasn't been all that much new retail (particularly grocery) development around here since the 90s. I mean, from the 60s to the 90s, a typical grocery store went from around 30,000 square feet to 50-60,000 sf, but now in 2020, a typical new grocery store (not that all that many are being built) is still 50-60,000 sf. While there's been a shift towards the supercenter concept in recent years, the concept was already established (with Walmart in the southeast and Fred Meyer in the northwest) by the 90s. There's also been a shift (at least around here) towards high-end grocery stores, but both Trader Joe's and Whole Foods were well established by the 90s. That all may or may not make any sense, but it's what I was thinking of when I wrote that.
DeleteI can see where you're coming from with that -- Safeway did sometimes use a serif font in the 90s, but I'm pretty sure it's not this one since (at least to my eyes) it looked a bit less serif-y, if that makes any sense. It might just be the unusual medium of this sign that makes it look a bit off, though. And they certainly did use a spaced-out wordmark on most Marina stores, which this may well be playing homage to. The strangest part has to be the fact that it's just painted metal, not illuminated in any way!
Ha, yeah, it is hard to think about. Again, it's only a fair comparison if you're looking at the very beginning of the 60s and 90s, and I suspect this store was built in the late 60s and remodeled in the late 90s, but still...
Supermarkets have not really changed much since the end of the 1990s. We started seeing some 'modern' supermarkets open up here in Houston in the late 1980s. The Willowchase Fiesta near the Willowbrook Mall in Houston opened in ~1988 and has not been renovated at all. Aside from the awesome neon lighting, the store still feels completely contemporary in terms of size, layout, having stores/banks within the store, and so forth.
ReplyDeleteSomethings which were common in the 1990s but mostly gone now are VHS movie rental departments and film developing.
Even through most of the 1990s, some supermarkets did not yet have conveyor belts for customers to put their items on before they were ringed up by the clerk. Instead, a lot of supermarkets had a little stand for you to push your cart to. The carts, which were the folding type that had a gate on the front, would go right next to the clerk and the clerk would open up the gate on the front of the cart and pull stuff off directly from the cart. You can kind of see what I'm talking about with the carts in this 1970s Safeway commercial. Try not to get the jingle stuck in your head, lol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k84LRxKTaw
Speaking of carts, I remember when retailers were experimenting with adding things to the carts in the 1990s to make shopping easier. Some had a check writing platform built into the cart near the handle, some had calculators on the handle for calculating things like unit pricing (which is pretty standard on price tags now, but not then), some had store directories printed on the cart along with ads, and then there are the cup holders which some carts still have.
Self-checkouts are obviously something relatively new. I remember in the 1990s it was still common for clerks to wear ties to work and they had special aprons or vests to wear. Some local grocers still require that, but it's become less common at chains. It was common for baggers to take your groceries (which were often in paper bags) out to your car and would load them in the car for you. It was expected to tip the bagger for this, but some stores even through the 1990s said that no tip was necessary for such service. When the baggers knew they were taking groceries out to the car, they used a special cart which they could load several bags on at one time. I have not seen one of those since around 2000 though!
The warehouse look of store design is relatively new. It wasn't common for stores to have open ceilings and especially concrete floors until relatively recently.
It's always interesting to hear about all these little things! For the most part they're a bit too old for me to remember (my memory is embarrassingly bad), but I certainly remember the Safeway movie rental section, which I believe held on all the way until the Albertsons merger (around here at least)! I think Safeway had film developing, too, but I'm not entirely sure since they didn't make a big deal of it like some places did. I do know that Albertsons did, though, since some of their stores still have the signage!
DeleteOh, and that's what those folding carts were for, huh? One independent grocery store that I shopped at a lot growing up had them until the early 2010s, but used them the same way as a normal grocery store, with the customers unloading them. The only store I can think of that still typically has employees unloading carts is Costco, which uses normal carts!
Wow, that's crazy that some Albertsons stores still have film developing signage! I have not seen signs for film developing at supermarkets around here in quite some time.
DeleteThe carts with the folding bodies usually existed so that carts could be stored in a way which took up less room. This was important back when stores were smaller. These days, most stores have areas in the vestibule or near the entrance of the store to keep their carts. On that note, I should say that cart corrals were a new thing in the 1980s, but they really took off in the 1990s. The Houston Auchan Hypermarket may have seen the first cart corrals I had seen when it opened in 1988, but they needed cart corrals because you had to put a quarter in the cart in order to release the lock on it! You'd get your quarter back when you put the cart lock back on when you returned your cart to the cart corral. I think Aldi still uses such a system.
The carts which had folding front gates, which also often had the folding bodies, were so the clerks could more easily grab stuff from the cart.
The Houston Chronicle newspaper has a photo slideshow of old Houston supermarkets which has some photos of these carts. Link: https://www.chron.com/news/article/Kroger-to-phase-out-plastic-bags-at-all-stores-13178215.php
Photos 36, 39, & 40 show those special carts I was talking about above which were for the baggers to use to take bags out to customer's cars.
Photo 40 also shows a cart with the folding body (you can see this better in that Safeway commercial).
Photos 47 and 48 show a Kroger checkout area. As you can see, there is no conveyor belt for customers to put their products on. They would park their carts right in front of the cashier and then the cashier would open the gate on the front of the cart and start pulling things off the cart. You can kind of see the open gate in photo 47 and photo 48 shows the store directory on the cart on that ad sign behind the child seat.
Photo 48 also shows a very early example of neon at a Kroger store.
It may not be obvious, but photos of Randall's like that one in Photo 36 show how advanced Randall's was in the early 1980s. They were really ahead of the game in designing supermarkets designed for the future. That's a very modern looking supermarket for 1984. A great short video is this Randall's video made in 1992. It really shows what their stores were like at the time and shows the video department and the photo developing area as well. You also see the formal attire worn by employees. Randall's put these videos on VHS tapes and mailed them to customers near where a new store was opening. It's pretty neat. This was a few years before Safeway bought out Randall's. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-eLf2uurLU