Still following the standard for Fred Meyer, the rest of the back wall is home to the housewares section, color coded in purple (which is a color that you don't seem to see all that often in grocery decor, for whatever reason). The decorative shelving here looks somewhat different (and older) than
what I'm used to seeing, strangely enough.
Purple is an underused color in retail in general. Maybe that's part of why I liked it in Gordmans' branding strategy so much. They effectively made it their own.
ReplyDeletePurple is a rather unusual retail color now that you mention it. I'm not sure when is the last time I went to a retailer where purple was used to any great extent. I didn't get a chance to visit Gordmans during the 5 minutes that they were in this area, lol.
DeletePurple is seen as being a very 1990s color. Perhaps retailers are a bit reluctant to use a color that might make people think that the store has not been renovated since the time of Barney the Purple Dinosaur's popularity (you and NW Retail might be too young to remember Barney...that's probably a good thing, lol). I think retailers avoided using earthtones for similar reasons to avoid a 1970s look.
I know that Stop & Shop up in New York and maybe other Ahold supermarkets use/used a lot of purple in their decor in recent times. Incredible Universe and Sam Goody (record store) used a lot of purple in the 1990s and they had a very distinctive look. The K&B pharmacy chain used a lot of purple as well as you can see in this Louisiana & Texas Retail post from Je. Check out those purple bookshelves: https://southernretail.blogspot.com/2012/08/k-b-lafayette-ambassador-caffery-now.html
Hopefully NW Retail won't mind this shameless plug, lol, but I wrote a guest blog post for the Houston Historic Retail blog that was published today. Well, part one was published today at least. It's about those retail videos from the Texas History database that I've been posting here. NW Retail has probably seen a large number of these already since I've posted them here, but part one takes a look at grocery stores and part two will look at everything else. Part two will probably have more surprises for everyone than part one, but here it is anyway: https://houstonhistoricretail.com/2021/03/31/taking-a-trip-to-grocery-stores-of-the-past/
I didn't realize Mike from HHR had posted the article as soon as he did so I was in for a bit of a surprise when I opened up the HHR website this morning and Retail Retell had replied to the post before I even knew that it was up, lol!
Yeah, I quite like the purple too! I certainly don't think it's necessarily an outdated color (Gordmans' look was quite nice), but then again I don't have any history with the time period Anonymous is discussing!
DeleteI'm definitely familiar with Barney, haha. I never really got into the show, but it was definitely very well-promoted when I was young! And lol at the HHR comment thing also -- I'll often check in on what's new in the morning, so I happened to see that, apparently hot off the press :P
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