Seriously, I don't think it's ever going to stop being weird to me to see a Safeway logo on a building like this. I know store conversions aren't that uncommon -- I've covered a few other, weirder stores that got turned into Safeways -- but this facade style is so distinctive, and was so common among Albertsons stores, that seeing it essentially unaltered but with a Safeway sign instead of an Albertsons one feels weird. But maybe that's just me.
I mean, to someone who's not that familiar with these building styles, I actually kinda like the Safeway logo better on here. But I can definitely understand how weird it feels!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Retail Retell, I prefer the Safeway look to that white-logo Albertsons look of before. Maybe all that snow on the Albertsons photo is biasing me. We still have snow around here and it knocked my power off for a couple of days so I had no heat (the power is on now, but probably only temporarily). Some people don't even have running water around here! What a mess.
ReplyDeleteBut, yeah, as far as rebadge jobs go, the Safeway here looks credible. If I didn't know any better, I might have guessed that was an original Safeway. If you want to see an Albertsons that was not rebadged with much effort, check this Houston Krogertsons! Link: https://goo.gl/maps/bpBAxJ3ZdymUaJxB6
Ha, I guess it really is just me! Personally, I always liked the way that the big Albertsons A looked on stores with this sort of gable design. It would probably look better with the traditional Safeway gabled-entry signage.
DeleteYeah, that snowstorm sounds really bad. And people say Seattle can't handle the snow! (Just kidding -- if we had that much snow and ice, it wouldn't go well for us either. Portland, which was hit a lot harder with the same storm we got last week, has been having power outages too, but at least there it's due to down wires, not a power grid that simply can't handle the load...)
Wow, Kroger really didn't put any effort into that! There aren't even a lot of real Albertsons left with those food and pharmacy signs (at least not around here).
There are actually a number of Krogertsons around here which still have the old Albertsons' food and pharmacy signs. I will say that Kroger has been putting new signs with their newest logo on some stores so this might change soon because some Krogertsons have lost their Albertsons' era signage here lately, but some have kept the Albertsons signs even with recent sign changes.
DeleteHere's another Houston area Krogertsons. This is actually a Grocery Palace design Albertsons. I can't say for sure, but I think Kroger actually moved the Albertsons food and pharmacy signs to make things look how they wanted it, but they still kept the signs. Also, not all Krogers with a Starbucks kiosk has a Starbucks sign on the outside, but this one does. That might be a holdover sign from Albertsons. Link: https://goo.gl/maps/MviwaWWJJahv5r757
The situation is quite bad here still. My power has been going on and off tonight. I think they're at a point now where they can do normal rolling blackouts. It's still annoying, but at least those kinds of blackouts means that power is off for too long. Still, it'll be below freezing in this part of Houston for the next two nights again. Also, some areas have very low water pressure and so residents do not have water. Even those like myself who do have near normal water pressure are being asked to boil the water before drinking it. We're not at all used to this kind of weather and it's really showing, but we had similar blackouts about a decade ago so I'm not sure why they appeared to be so unprepared this year.
That certainly seems odd that Kroger would keep those Albertsons remnants for so long, but I guess they look similar enough to Kroger's block lettering that those stores have! (That block lettering seems weird to me too, but that's another issue...)
DeleteWow, that's not good. Hopefully this will be a wake-up call to whoever's in charge of these things in your area, especially with extreme weather events like this expected to increase (at least in the short term). Seattle had a similarly-bad snowstorm in 2008 that was a serious disaster for the region (I don't remember the exact specifics, but my dad was trying to go somewhere for work and ended up stuck on the freeway for hours), and it seems like we learned enough from that that the handful of major snowstorms since I moved to Seattle haven't been a major issue.
You never really know what Kroger is going to do around here, lol. Here is a SafeAppleKroger in Houston. This is to say that it was a Safeway that converted to AppleTree when Safeway left Texas in the late 1980s. When AppleTree closed up in around 1993, Kroger took over the location, but they've maintained the signs on the outside with the departments that AppleTree put up in the 1980s! This is also a Kroger in a high traffic, wealthy area on I-10 in an area called Hedwig Village. That also explains the unusual aspect of Kroger putting up a sign calling this store "Kroger of the Villages". Also note that there is a somewhat rare shopping center Walgreens still in this shopping center: https://goo.gl/maps/B6A7y3FvdMkKcV3P7
DeleteThat store has a very unusual layout, but it's not quite as unusual as the layout of the nearby SafeAppleKroger with the diagonal layout that I think I shared with you recently.
I know a lot of people have noticed the strange block letters that Kroger uses in their signage here in Houston and elsewhere in Texas. I think Kroger is moving away from that. In the last two years, Kroger has been putting new signs on some of their stores and the new signs more or less use the actual Kroger logo. One of the stores nearby got a new sign with the newest logo, but they kept the Bauhaus font Pharmacy sign on the outside! I'm not complaining, of course. This is one of those early Kroger Signature stores that experimented with having KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut Express locations when it opened in around 1993. I'm not sure if you heard about those.
I think there is going to be a lot of pressure to change things regarding power here in Texas after this fiasco that is still going on. Here in Texas, homeowners can choose to get their power from a number of retailers and those retailers usually offer variable rates with promises of lower rates (sometimes) or fixed rate plans like I have. Reports are that those with variable rate plans have seen their rates skyrocket this week to the point that some people are paying $400-500 a day for just electricity. There are reports that those on fixed rate plans are getting calls from their power companies to cutback their power usage or change providers because they're taking on huge losses since the power generating organization has hiked up their rates that the providers have to pay. It's a real mess and, unfortunately, some of us knew this was a fiasco waiting to happen. Even still, I didn't think it would get to be this bad.
Wow, I guess Kroger in your area really doesn't care that much about their signage! Of course, as I mentioned the other day, QFC's signage is all over the place too, so it's not unique to your area.
DeleteWow, that's crazy! This whole thing makes me glad that all of my utilities are run by the city. There's always grumbling about how the city runs things (I think that's pretty much a universal thing!), but at least everything seems to be relatively reliable and stable compared to what I'm hearing from Texas (and some other areas).
Yes, it certainly seems that Kroger is taking the 'anything will do' approach to signage! You might remember that Kroger I shared with you in the East Texas small town of Henderson that is in an old Safeway that still has 1980s Safeway signage and interior decor up. Even within Houston, Kroger has kept some real relics around. There's a Kroger in an urban part of town that started as a Weingarten's, which was once a large local chain that sold their grocery operations to Grand Union (GU didn't stick around long in Houston) and is still around as a shopping center developer, then became a Safeway, and then probably became an AppleTree before becoming a Kroger. I'm not sure whose signage is on the outside of the store, but it looks really old. Link: https://goo.gl/maps/NnGH7bwDA3z9twS27
DeleteIn fact, even with all the tenants at this location, an old Weingarten's sign still persisted at this location until 2017. Kroger was hiding it with a "Right Store, Right Price" banner. The banner was finally taken down in 2017 showing the old Weingarten's sign that would have been outdated in the early 1980s, but Kroger finally painted over the sign. It made the local news, lol. Link: http://swamplot.com/secretly-preserved-weingarten-history-quickly-erased-from-side-of-weingarten-owned-heights-kroger/2017-03-01/
If you look at the interior shots of that store, you'll see a gabled roof ceiling, which is very unusual for Krogers around here (though very common for Randall's), and you'll also see a very old floor with a faded orange stripe around the store. It's certainly a retro Kroger, that's for sure. It may not be quite as retro as the aforementioned Henderson store, but they are both shrines to the early 1980s, lol.
As for municipal power goes, I'm not sure how exactly things are structured in Seattle, but in general it seems that municipal, or at even state-run, utilities with the sole purpose of providing service to residential customers and businesses without any privatization/quasi-privatization gimmicks are the key to reliable and affordable infrastructure. There might be ways to lower utility costs for customers through those gimmicks for a while, but they usually fall apart in the most inopportune times and either lead to loss of service and/or ridiculous rates in the long run. You're probably too young to remember this, but I'm sure most people in their 30s on up on the west coast remember the disaster in California 20 years ago due to energy deregulation. All of that was a big part of what led to Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor of California, lol. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%9301_California_electricity_crisis
If you're interested in that topic, another situation worth reading about is the situation in Cleveland, OH involving the Municipal Light/Cleveland Public Power public utility and the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company in the late 1970s.