Thankfully, I was smart and decided to draw up this store's layout as soon as I got back that night, since it's got to be the strangest store layout I've ever seen! (Unfortunately, without access to AutoCAD, my layout drawings are a lot less pretty than they used to be...) The grocery wing off to the left (north) is the original part of the store, with the much larger general merchandise side of the store being the 80s addition. It's hard to say what the strangest part of this layout is... the almost complete separation between grocery and the rest of the store? The lack of checkouts in the grocery department, despite it having a separate entrance? The pharmacy being off the clothing section? The clothing department being in the center of the store, surrounded by aisles? The natural foods department that's clear across the store from the rest of grocery? That last one is probably the winner, but there are plenty of bizarre decisions to go around. And what's worse, instead of making things better in the recent remodel, Fred Meyer decided to make this store make even less sense.
This is a bit strange. It reminds me a bit of the old first generation Kmart and Target type stores with Kmart Foods and the Target equivalent. The supermarkets on those were always rather separate from the store itself, but they did have their own registers so it's not completely the same as this Fred Meyer.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the L-shape is very unusual for a discount store.
Yeah, I believe that sort of setup was once somewhat common for Fred Meyer (especially in stores they bought from other chains), but this is the last one left. I'm sure the layout here once made at least somewhat more sense, but over the years it's evolved into this absolute mess.
DeleteNatural foods is what caught my eye as weirdest, but all of those that you bring up are valid points!
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