Meat, meet the bakery

I know most of you wouldn't see this as being all that weird, but for someone who's maybe a bit too accustomed to Safeway's typical 70s-2000s store layout, having the meat department next to the bakery just feels weird. Almost every Safeway I've been to (that isn't a former Albertsons that kept the old layout) that's big enough for a bakery and a meat department is a store that was built for Safeway during that time period, so seeing this one with it's layout that's kind of similar, sort of different is just weird. Despite the weird layout, this store is large enough that the service departments are at least as large as normal (especially the meat department, which looks extra large in this picture), even though they're in weird spots. And all of the service departments look so much like a normal Safeway one that I can't imagine much is left over from Fred Meyer here, so why Safeway didn't go the full way and rearrange the store to fit their typical model is beyond me. (If they had kept a lot from Fred Meyer, I would have loved that for its strangeness, but this half-remodel is just weird.)

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  1. Now that you mention it, most Randall's stores in Houston do have the bakery and the hot deli up in the front corner of the store in front of the produce. Not only has that been the common position of the bakery in the current Safeway Lifestyle era, but the independent Randall's used to put their bakeries and delis in a similar position even before Safeway bought the chain. That said, there is some variance in our Randall's store.

    Take this Randall's which is a former Albertsons location, but Safeway extensively redid when they took it over. The bakery, and also the bread & rolls department, is back behind the produce and next to the meats: https://goo.gl/maps/qsNGH3CaJskNCp1u6

    However, this nearby Randall's which is also in a former Albertsons (I'm pretty sure), has a more typical layout: https://goo.gl/maps/1hMFEotq4Xgd9MXt7

    This Randall's, which is not too far from the previous two, has the bakery and deli on the complete opposite side of the produce department: https://goo.gl/maps/yLK6BQFZ2CqTLrzb7

    Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I'm pretty sure the Safeway bakeries here were in the front corner of the store on the opposite side of where the produce department was. In other words, it was on the dairy side of the store. It had a similar position as the bakeries in Kroger Greenhouse stores. That particular placement was common in 1970s-1980s supermarkets, but it seems that 1990s supermarkets started moving them to the front corner in front of the produce. I'm not sure why, but it probably had something to do with combining the bakery with the kitchens of the hot food delis that were starting to become more popular in the 1990s.

    This is not really related to bakery positions, but you might like taking a look at this Randall's. It's got somewhat unique decor that combines Lifestyle v2 (I suppose) with Kroger Fresh-n-Local decor and other Kroger decor which uses photos of local landmarks as part of the decor. The store also has some bright color elements of Lifestyle v3 (I suppose, I'm not as knowledgeable about these decor packages as you are). This particular location is in one of Houston's most wealthy areas so hopefully that won't bias you against the store, lol. Link: https://goo.gl/maps/QrVQcjMHyw8tzu3X9

    I like this photo from that store which shows off the spotlights: https://goo.gl/maps/uLcoBDyf57hH2o4e7

    Having looked at all these stores, it does remind me how good the Lifestyle v2 package can look (IMO at least). It probably helps that our Randall's/Safeway stores have some subtle differences which perhaps breaks up the cookie cutter feeling somewhat.

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    1. Just to add to the commentary about the last Randall's I posted, it does look like the spotlights were replaced with regular lighting at some point in the not so distant past (I'm thinking that either you or PlazaACME has said that this is common at Lifestyle Safeways in recent years). I'm not sure if any spotlights still exist to supplement the regular lighting. While the regular lights are not as fancy, it does brighten up the area quite a bit. Link: https://goo.gl/maps/KdAWXj9YQcJbgDSP9

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    2. I don't know if you've seen this, but this is what I'd consider the typical northwest Safeway layout. I've heard from multiple people from other parts of the country (both on here who've seen that plan and people I know in person who moved to the northwest) that they think it's quite weird, but it's what I'm used to, and I've always liked the fact that you can stop in at nearly any Safeway in the northwest and know roughly where everything is. It's hard for me to reconstruct the layout of a store from pictures without having actually visited the store (which is why I used to draw floor plans of most of the stores I visited, until it got to the point where my visits were long enough in the past that I didn't remember the layout myself!), but those Randall's you linked to look rather strange to me! However, that third one you linked, surprisingly enough, looks fairly similar to my current Safeway (that flickr set includes a floor plan at the end). It's also the newest pre-merger Safeway I've visited, having been built in 2008, so maybe Safeway was starting to take some inspiration from Randall's!

      I actually quite like that last one, with the Lifestyle v2/v3 hybrid decor. The use of the old Lifestyle font fixes the one issue I have with Lifestyle v3! Those local flair pictures are somewhat common in v3 stores (and even some late v2 locations), and I wish they would have been used more widely.

      Yep, that lighting thing is quite common, if not universal -- you can even see it in this picture, even, with one random leftover row of spotlights. Around here, most Safeways got it in the mid-2010s, shortly after the decor refreshes. It's too bad, really, because it really does cheapen the look and I'm not convinced the stores needed to be brightened up that much (though I've heard a lot of complaints from other areas, so perhaps Safeway's Washington division was just doing different things before the chainwide lighting refresh).

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    3. That third Randall's in my list, the one that reminds you of your Safeway, was heavily renovated somewhere between 2007 and 2011. I really don't know what it looked like before the renovations, but I think it's quite possible that it had the typical pre-Safeway Randall's configuration of the bakery and hot deli being in front of the produce department (floral would be up there too). Given the time frame of the renovation, that store must be quite similar to your 2008 Safeway due to them being some about the same time period even if the Houston Randall's is physically much older.

      Looking at the map you provided, yeah, that's quite different than most Randall's stores here (the store I just mentioned above being an exception, obviously). That layout actually looks more like the Safeway stores we had here in the 1970s-1980s, but it's not exactly similar. If you want to know the layout of those older Texas Safeways, I suggest looking at this Market Basket supermarket in Beaumont, TX (East Texas near Louisiana). Although it's been renovated extensively since it was a Safeway/AppleTree, the store still has the same layout that Safeway would have had when that store opened in around 1980 or so I'm guessing. I know it's hard to get a feel for the layout from the photos, but hopefully you can get some idea of things: https://goo.gl/maps/Fh15bkZgztabm1Xt8

      Anyway, it seems that Safeway in your part of the country is sticking with layouts that were more or less common 40-50 years ago (like we see with that Market Basket or Kroger Greenhouse stores) instead of a more common layout in modern times that Kroger and others use which typically puts the bakery near the produce department.

      As far as Randall's here in Houston, things vary quite a bit as you can see, but I would say the most common layout is like that one with the v2/v3 hybrid decor or that second Albertsons-turned-Randall's I posted.

      I don't think I mind v3 as much as you do, lol, but I do agree that the v2 font and v3 colors are a good mix. The local photos are implemented better than what Kroger has done, but I must say that HEB was doing something similar in 1992-3 when they started their Pantry Foods concept.

      Sometimes older shoppers complain about poor lighting. I'm sure Safeway got complaints and so that's why they switched things up. The spotlights did look nice though.

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    4. You're right, that Market Basket does look quite a bit like a typical Safeway from around here! I suspect the newest Safeways (post-merger) would look more familiar to you, but Safeway isn't building very many new stores and they don't seem particularly interested in changing the layout of their current stores when they remodel (though some of the Albertsons conversions are getting slight changes to their layout to look more like the new-build Safeways, which definitely are very much Albertsons-inspired).

      I suspect that Safeway around here valued consistency for many years, which is why they didn't want to update their store layouts to match changing retail trends. I certainly appreciate that, compared to stores like Albertsons or even Walmart that tend to be all over the place such that it's hard to find anything if you're not familiar with the store. (That being said, Safeway tended to mess that up even if you shop at the same store every day with their frequent major resets, something that thankfully seems to have slowed down since the merger.)

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    5. Actually, that Snoqualmie Ridge Safeway looks quite strange to me, lol. It's possible that there are some Tom Thumb stores in the Dallas area which look like that, but I'm not sure. I think there are more new Tom Thumbs than Randall's in recent years, but I know that the Austin suburb of Georgetown did get a new Randall's a couple of years ago.

      The closest store I can think of here in Houston which looks like that Snoqualmie Ridge Safeway would be the Midtown (near downtown) Randall's which is also the only Randall's in Houston, AFAIK at least, which has the Modern decor package. That might be the only Randall's I know of which has the frozen food on the far side of the store like modern Krogers, but that Randall's is quite different because it has a mezzanine. That particular Randall's was certainly space constrained and so that sometimes leads to odd designs. Link: https://goo.gl/maps/Mv8xKU6H9ieJqrV38

      Safeway did have some odd stores here in Houston in the 1980s that had a very odd diamond-like layout instead of the typical rectangular box. Here's an example of one that Kroger took over and you can see from the photos that it's a very odd layout. Link: https://goo.gl/maps/LCMcY8urtvoj16Fa7

      Although there is some variance with Randall's layouts here as you can clearly tell, I find their stores to generally be pretty easy to navigate. The fact that my local Randall's is quite small does help navigation as well. Kroger stores here are highly variable because we have a mix of 2000s era 'Signature' stores, Marketplace stores, Marketplace styled but not Marketplace stores, Greenhouse stores, ex-Albertsons layouts using the various layouts Albertsons used, and then various oddballs like an ex Weingarten/Safeway/AppleTree location, those diamond stores above, and so forth.

      HEB tends to be a bit more consistent than some of the others, but their typical layouts are so odd and confusing that even consistency won't help you navigate their stores. They're a hot mess of poor design, but HEB is quite sharp from a business perspective so their messy designs must lead to more impulse buys or something.

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    6. There are certainly lots of weird store layouts out there, but wow, that diamond-y Safeway/Kroger is sure bizarre! It kind of makes me think of the "diamond windows" Rite Aids, not in terms of the specific layout, but just in the whole concept of weird, out there design ideas that seem to make things overly confusing. And space-constrained stores are always an interesting thing too -- Safeway does have a good number of those around here, often built as the ground floor to a mixed-use building, and they can have some very strange layouts. I don't have any great examples posted yet, but here's a good example.

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    7. Seattle and Houston are very different in that it seems that Seattle has a lot of downtown/'urban grid' retail, but Houston does not. Of course, that downtown retail tends to be the most space constrained. Houston has had very little traditional retail in downtown since the early days of suburbanization. In recent years, the amount of traditional retail downtown has only decreased even as the amount of downtown apartments/condos has increased. That Midtown/downtown Randall's is, AFAIK, the only traditional chain grocery store in/near downtown.

      There was a Fiesta nearby which was next to a Sears from 1939, but the Sears closed a couple years ago and the Fiesta was closed just recently. I believe both were evicted by their landlord (Rice University in at least the case of the Sears, but I think Rice may own the land the Fiesta was on as well) so the land could be turned into other projects. The Fiesta didn't have a strange layout, but it was on the smaller side and it was very 1980s looking on the inside (I used to shop at the Sears and Fiesta at times when they were still around). Our downtown Macy's/ex-Foley's was closed and demolished in around 2013. It looked very different from the Seattle BonMacy's, that's for sure, lol.

      Anyway, I think that Midtown Randall's opened during the early days of Safeway's ownership of the chain and I'm sure their experience running urban supermarkets in the western US helped them design and run that odd location.

      That Seattle Safeway you linked is interesting. It's a bit strange seeing the Lifestyle decor in such an industrial looking building, but the colors and flooring do give it a cozy, warm feeling. I like it. I also like that it has a big clock. The Randall's nearest to me has one too, but it is a rather unusual feature. The layout of that Seattle is certainly atypical, but I suppose it had to be to fit.

      I earlier said that the Midtown Randall's might be the only Houston Randall's with the frozen food on the side of the store instead of being in the middle, but after giving it more thought, I'm not sure if that's true. The now-closed 290 & Barker Cypress Randall's had the frozen food towards the side of the store...on the produce side of all things! That was very strange at least compared to what I am used to. I'm not sure if Safeway used that design anywhere else here in Houston.

      Yes, diamond shaped stores are a bit strange. Walgreens have entrances in the corner of many of their freestanding stores, but the actual layout of the store is more or less what you'd expect from a 'box' design. That's certainly not the case with that Kroger/ex-Safeway though! That store has some strange corners. We have a ton of Krogers in Houston. A good number of them have a pretty typical 2000s+ Kroger layout, but almost an equal number of them have something odd going on, lol.

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