This is just a little something funny in addition to today's regular pictures! 🙂 My Pinehurst Safeway has been having serious issues with cart supplies lately, presumably due to people walking off with them (I would say homeless people, since that's the stereotype, but considering my apartment complex has a fleet of stolen shopping carts, it's clearly not just homeless people taking them...). It got so bad that when I went shopping last week, there wasn't a single available cart to be found -- none at either entrance or any of the parking lot corrals! Unsurprisingly, Safeway doesn't seem to want to invest in brand-new carts for stores like this anymore, but their stock of used Safeway carts must be running out, since on today's visit, almost the entire fleet of carts at my Safeway was this model of pre-merger, Albertsons-branded mini carts! I've seen one-off misbranded carts before (heck, my Safeway growing up always had one Vons cart mixed in, something I've always wondered about how it happened), but I found it amusing on this scale. (Oh, and the stuff in the cart is masks and hand sanitizer they were giving out at the door. That's nice!)
Randall's stores around here have signs indicating that the wheels of the carts lock if the cart is removed from the store area. Or something like that at least. I wonder if Safeway up in the NW has similar technology. Of course, it's possible the technology doesn't work or it's just a fake scare tactic.
ReplyDeletePerhaps this Safeway needs to use the cart deposit model that Aldi uses and Auchan used here in Houston when they opened up in 1988 where you have to put a quarter into the cart to release it from the other carts and then have to put the lock back on to get your quarter back. Then again, I suppose losing a quarter isn't disincentive enough for many people to not steal a cart!
Yeah, there are a handful like that, but I'm not convinced the technology actually works all that reliably seeing as I've seen a handful of carts with the wheel lock things installed out on the street! It's got to be better than nothing, but I wouldn't be surprised if Safeway decided it's more trouble than it's worth.
DeleteThose coin deposit things aren't something I've ever seen around here (my only experience with them is in Europe), but I'd be pretty surprised if they work. 25 cents doesn't seem like it would be enough to motivate many people who were already planning to steal a cart, plus if you've stolen it, I imagine there would be a way to get your quarter back by taking apart the mechanism. (Perhaps that's an issue with the wheel lock design too...) Also, I can't imagine all that many people carry around quarters with them! I've heard of some stores giving out fake quarters to use in the mechanism... but that seems to provide even less reason for people to return the carts.
I never knew Auchan had US stores in the past -- in fact, I don't remember even having heard of that company on my visits to Europe. That sort of failed experiment is always fascinating to me, and it's too bad that this part of the country never seems to get cool retail experiments like that (we just get boring Amazon stuff that I have no interest in covering).
Oh, yes, we were lucky enough here in Houston to get two Auchan Hypermarkets. The first, which opened in 1988, was a spectacular store. It was very large, it was quite a bit larger than a Walmart Supercenter. The store had a McDonald's, Pizza Hut Express, Taco Bell, and maybe a couple of other food vendors. It also had a little mall up front. That lasted until about 2003 or so when Auchan left the US. The store had about 80 checkout stands up front!
DeleteThe original Houston Auchan was joined by a second location that opened in around 2000 or so. That was in an old ~1970 Target location that was quite large because Targets also had a semi-independent supermarket attached to them kind of like the Kmart Foods locations of the time. That location was smaller and less spectacular than the original location, but it was still interesting. I believe Auchan had a third, shortlived US location in Chicago, but it was only a supermarket and not a hypermarket.
Anyway, the Houston stores, especially the original location, were a bit more than an experiment given that it was around for about 15 years. Although Auchan is French, the original location always had a lot of support from Houston's Asian community due to it being closely located to Houston's version of Chinatown (though in Houston, the Vietnamese community is the largest Asian community in town). Supposedly Sam Walton visited Auchan and took some ideas from them. They were a great store and had some good prices and great bakery items as you'd expect from a French store.
I shopped at Auchan many times even though it wasn't all that close to me. They had good prices which made it worthwhile and they had good deals on things like music CDs. One odd memory I have of Auchan is that it is where I bought my first (and perhaps only) Crystal Clear Pepsi after it was first launched with much fanfare in 1992-3. You might laugh, lol, but the launch of Crystal Clear Pepsi was a huge cultural event back then.
Here is a Houston Auchan commercial from the mid-1990s. Link: https://youtu.be/cl-s-tJn0Is
The original Houston location was subdivded after Auchan closed and half of it is now a FoodTown supermarket. The FoodTown retains some of Auchan's designs: https://goo.gl/maps/yUeZ5nCTasURoSeR7
Wow, that's certainly an imposing (and, honestly, oppressive) building design! I have to wonder what the architects were thinking. I much prefer Fred Meyer's designs from that era, when they too were trying to be a real hypermarket (though I don't believe any of their stores were quite as big as that one). Pretty cool that the building is still there and looks much as it originally did, though!
DeleteThe French and Houston had some notable 'everything is bigger in Texas' moments back in the mid-to-late 1980s. Famous French electronic music musician Jean Michel Jarre and Houston decided to put on a concert and fireworks show called Rendez-vous Houston in 1986 that would break the record for the largest concert ever held. It was a spectacular show and estimates for attendance range from 1 million to 1.5 million people (yours truly was there with my family...the traffic was horrendous!).
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendez-vous_Houston
Given all of that, I suppose Auchan decided to make their store larger than life in some ways. I suppose it's difficult to design a store so large to look good! I will say that the interior of the store was as nice as one can possibly expect from such a large discount store. The store had real floors and the produce department had a wooden frame around it like we saw with some of those The Fresh Market stores. You can see some brief indoor shots in the commercial I linked above.
Here's a shot from the Food Town showing some Auchan design features including the skylight (now painted over) and part of the food court (the McDonald's was located somewhat separately from the rest of the food court) which now mostly has cell phone repair stores. The mall part of the Auchan is off in the distance. The store looks big in just this image alone, but that's only half of what the Auchan was! Link: https://goo.gl/maps/9pTRrhcmwGcQapru9
I was at the grand opening of the original Auchan and it was one of the rare 'wow' moments I ever had when seeing a new retailer. My initial visits to Incredible Universe and Fry's were similar moments. Interestingly, even though I visited Auchan many times over the ~15 years they were here, I was still wowed by the size of their store during each visit. It was really something remarkable. And, of course, you had to have a quarter to use one of their carts, lol.