The left side of the store has pretty much the same exact layout as most Fred Meyers do to this day, with various home and hardware departments lining the left actionway. It is a bit unusual for the furniture department to be at the back of this actionway, rather than the front, however. And it wouldn't be a summer tour of a hypermarket in the Northwest without a giant stack of box fans for people to use in place of an air conditioner! I have two of this exact model of fan myself, one bought from Fred Meyer and the other from Target. (I'm sure this isn't just a Northwest thing, but it's an extremely common sight around here in late spring/early summer.)
I think box fans are more of a northern thing than a southern thing. Here, where most people have A/C, box fans are not used as commonly. That's not to say that they are unusual here. I do have a couple of box fans from the 1970s (they're all metal), but I have not used them in years!
ReplyDeleteSome of the vintage electronics enthusiasts I watch on YouTube who live in the north are fans of box fans and have done several videos about them! It seems that dehumidifiers are another popular item up north that are rendered rather useless with the popularity of A/C here in the south.
Yeah, no surprise there! As I learned the hard way last month, they aren't particularly useful when even the outside night temperature isn't comfortable, and I'm sure you guys have many more days like that than we do, to say the least!
DeleteDehumidifiers are another interesting regional thing. I know that in many areas, people use dehumidifiers during the summer, and humidifiers in the winter. Around here, there's no real use for humidifiers, and dehumidifiers are more of a winter thing (yes, humidity can get rather high in the summer too, but dehumidifiers put out too much heat for them to be practical).