I took this picture looping through some of the grocery aisles in my (rather frustrating) quest to actually buy some stuff on this visit. I couldn't figure out where it would really fit in my posting order for this set, so here it is as a little spoiler as I keep going through the grocery section.
Wal-Mart really could have livened up those department signs with putting the Walmart asterisk logo (I'm sure they don't call it that, lol) somewhere on those signs. It's odd that they didn't include those. On the bright side of things, at least it seems Wal-Mart long ago eradicated the smiley face logos from theit stores...or so I hope, lol.
ReplyDeleteI can see how those arrows look kind of airportish, but Target used arrows kind of similar to that decades ago! Link (I'm stealing this from my own blog post, lol): https://houstonhistoricretail.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Target_1988.jpg
Hopefully this reply goes through using Private Mode! Blogger seems to be frustrating just about everyone these days. Hopefully that's not a sign that Google is planning on discontinuing it!
It seems like they're really going for a monochromatic blue look these days, for better or for worse. (I like blue, but this decor can get a little overwhelming at times, as we'll see soon enough!)
DeleteI'm glad you reminded me where I had seen that picture before -- in my opinion, that style of signage is the most airport-like of anything I've ever seen in a grocery store! It seems like a lot of airports worldwide use that sort of horizontally-arranged signage with large arrows. Again, I'm probably being too literal, but I've never seen signage like what this store has in an actual airport.
And just to plug my own thing, you might be interested to know that I've finished up the Safeway(/Albertsons/Haggen) list for Washington! Not a ton of surprises there other than the things I've already mentioned, but it feels nice to have it all written down. I'm moving on to Oregon next!
From what Mike might have told me some months back, it seems that Target photo with the graph paper arrows was the most popular photo in that very long annual reports post that I did, lol. In a way, I'm not really surprised. I certainly have strong memories of those signs at Target stores back in the day. While they don't really look like airport signage, they certainly look more airport-like than those Wal-Mart signs.
DeleteThe Wal-Mart signs don't look like airport signs. They're just arrows from what I can tell, lol. We'll see how things develop in further images, but it seems that retailers are becoming quite optimistic with some of their decor names here in recent times. Kroger has their mass-produced 'Artisan' decor and then there is this jet-setting Wal-Mart decor, lol.
I'm glad to see the list is coming along. I had never heard of Leavenworth, WA, but there's some real retail oddities in that place like the McDonald's that looks kind of like the McDonald's I went to in Switzerland, lol. The town kind of reminds me of Fredericksburg and New Braunsfels, TX, but those places actually have real German heritage in terms of settlers. I'm not sure if that's the case with Leavenworth or if it's just a marketing gimmick! Either way, that might be a neat place to cover at some point.
I'm almost certain I've never seen Target decor like that in person (I'm not sure if Target was even in the northwest when they were using that decor), but it's still cool! The style certainly isn't like anything I can remember seeing in an airport, but the overall layout does seem fairly airport-like to me. The Walmart stuff, on the other hand, really seems like a stretch from their marketing people!
DeleteHa, Leavenworth is really just a tourist trap, sadly. It's not exactly my sort of place, and it's always insanely busy with tourists (so they're successful with their gimmicks, at least!).
Re: the Walmart logo -- it's called a spark :)
ReplyDeleteAlso, while Artisan is an official name, I don't know that Airport is. That's simply what we'd just kind of collectively taken to calling it.
Ah, yes, it's the spark. Thanks. I knew it had a name, but I forgot what it is!
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