I know I've mentioned this already, but the weirdest thing about this store might be its pharmacy drive-through. These are not common at all at QFC (or any northwest grocery store for that matter) -- in fact, I believe this is the only QFC I've ever visited with a drive-through pharmacy (though some built after the Kroger acquisition do have them). I have to wonder about the history here -- this is another thing that makes me wonder if this wasn't originally a QFC (though I don't know who they would have bought it from that would have had a drive-through pharmacy), or if QFC wanted to make these more standard at some point, or if it was just a complete one-off.
It's not unheard of for Kroger to add drive-thru pharmacy lanes to much older locations built without them as long as the pharmacy is facing one of the sides of the store that is open such that a drive-thru lane can be added. Safeway did the same thing with some very old Randall's locations here in Houston including my local store which now has a drive-thru pharmacy.
ReplyDeleteHere is a Kroger in a very lightly disguised Safeway building in East Texas where they've added a drive-thru. It goes without saying that the drive-thru did not exist when Safeway closed that location in the late 1980s. Link: https://goo.gl/maps/uvuGt1ViZkQPorve7
At Greenhouse Krogers here in Houston, where the pharmacy is not facing a sidewall and the stores are often in the middle of a shopping center, Kroger has added walk-up pharmacy windows on the outside front of the store. These walk-up windows get a surprisingly large amount of use, even pre-pandemic, even though it's just as easy to walk into the store and use the window there. I don't get it, but here is one example: https://goo.gl/maps/R8Gr6sRcTGKFE9vB7
Just for completeness, here is a Randall's with a drive-thru that was added decades after the store was built (by Handy Andy): https://goo.gl/maps/wp9xBYwu7bSr9aPR9
Yeah, I believe that's fairly common for Kroger, but it hasn't extended to QFC for the most part. Of course, most QFCs that have pharmacies have them in the back of the store, so not somewhere that it could be added without moving the pharmacy... but it seems like if they were to go to the effort of adding a drive through, it wouldn't be that much added effort to move the pharmacy too.
DeleteThere are also a few QFCs (and Fred Meyers) with walk-up pharmacies like that around here. I agree, they don't seem to make much sense (and the ones I've seen don't seem to get much use either).
Interesting to hear that about Randall's! I'm pretty sure there isn't a single Safeway with a drive-through pharmacy around here, not even the ones built following the Albertsons merger. Our Safeways built between the time that drive-through pharmacies started appearing and the Albertsons merger almost always have the pharmacy in the center back of the store, where a drive-through wouldn't be possible, but the two built post-merger have the pharmacy in a front corner where they could have built one if they wanted to.
That's odd that Safeway does not use drive-thru pharmacies in your area. I'm pretty sure that Randall's drive-thru above was put in by Safeway during the store's ~2003 remodel. I know that with the Randall's on Westheimer & S. Gessner that opened about a decade ago, it does not have a drive-thru pharmacy, but that location has shopping center parts on both sides of the store.
DeleteLooking at the Randall's that was built and opened in Georgetown (Austin) in 2017-18, it does have a drive-thru pharmacy so it seems that Safeway/Albertsons was still committed to drive-thru pharmacies here even in more recent times: https://goo.gl/maps/7Z1QtjguRLpoC2oJ7
One thing some of our Krogers have are remote drive-thrus that operate kind of like motor banks and I suppose use vacuum tubes to send items across the parking lot. Here's one such example (you'll have to zoom in to the little green roofed hut to see what I'm talking about): https://goo.gl/maps/G7juQYVKJvKDkH2z6
There's a close-up view of the remote drive-thru here in this HHR post: https://houstonhistoricretail.com/2021/08/13/what-makes-a-krogerstons-special/
That's very interesting -- the ones that opened in this area in the past few years (Snoqualmie and southeast Puyallup) look almost identical to that Randall's, but don't have a drive through!
DeleteThere are a few Rite Aids around here that use a remote drive-through setup like that, which I've always found interesting. Strangely, they're all fairly normal looking, recently-built stores, so it's not like they did that as a retrofit (whereas some older stores did get normal drive-throughs retrofitted).