Jumping all the way to the other end of the back actionway, the back left corner is home to the garden and floral department. The very strange looking canopy here is similar to what we saw in
Florence's Cartoon store, but looks even stranger without any decor -- and the purple light tubes only add to the weirdness (I wonder what the intent was with those).
Those purple lights are probably plant growing lights. I don't know if they output more UV or what, but I reckon they are used to try to keep plants which need a lot of sunlight alive inside.
ReplyDeleteI came across a really strange Tom Thumb on Google Maps today. It's a store that still had proto-Lifestyle until around 2019! I know that is/was hardly uncommon in places such as Colorado, but here in Texas, I can't recall any Randall's/Tom Thumbs still having a non-Lifestyle/Modern decor package past 2010 or so. This store even had, and maybe still has, coffin coolers for frozen food! Link: https://goo.gl/maps/RQPsJxD39MSiSdxi8
What's really strange is that when the store got renovated into Colorful Lifestyle v2 in around 2019, it got the old proto-Lifestyle aisle markers replaced with what appears to be an earlier Lifestyle design. Was Safeway still using those for renovations as late as 2019 or did Safeway hand those down to this location from another store? This is really strange! Link: https://goo.gl/maps/6dTWsfKjztw2piE8A
Yeah, that makes sense, though it's strange to see them inside a store!
DeleteThat is interesting! It was the same way in Washington, but there are always some weird stragglers it seems. Frozen coffin coolers have always seemed weird to me, and I don't think I've ever seen them in any stores around here -- either all of the major chains worked to eliminate them, or they were just never popular. (I feel like the northwest would make more sense for them than places like Texas or Florida! 😃)
Yeah, 2019 is super late for standard Lifestyle v2 aisle markers. The Lifestyle v2.1 version was introduced circa 2010-2011, and while the original v2 version was probably used for a few years after that, I'm sure it was out of use by the mid-2010s. I have seen some stores where I believe they were recycled from other stores, and I imagine that was the case here too. It's a little hard to tell, but it looks like this store's version of Colorful Lifestyle v2 is weird overall -- it seems to be missing the arches as well as the product images.
Coffin coolers for frozen food were very common here at least through the 1980s. Randall's, Safeway, and Kroger all used them and all put their frozen foods down the middle of the store with those coffin coolers. I can't really recall which grocer was the first to get rid of them here in Houston. It might have been Fiesta Mart actually, but these days I can't think of any major grocers who still use them for frozen food outside of oddball locations. Kroger and Randall's do still use them for some meat, fish, and dairy products, but those are much smaller coffin coolers than the frozen foods ones for the most part.
DeleteI really can't explain why that Tom Thumb didn't get a renovation for so long and then why it got a rather basic renovation when it did get renovated with hand-me-down aisle markers. At least they did put in a nice floor so it wasn't totally cheap. The old aisle markers are really weird though! Maybe they thought the terraced roof line at that store would make it difficult to use the newer style Safeway aisle markers?
The funny thing is that the closest competitor to that Tom Thumb is a Kroger that held onto the Script decor for a lot longer than most Dallas and Houston area Krogers did. It looks like maybe it just got renovated to Banner in the last year or two. While some East Texas Krogers did hold onto Script for a while, most of the big city Texas Krogers were converted into Bountiful around 2012 or so, but this store managed to escape that. It looked really good with the Script decor though, it certainly looks classy in this style Kroger. This style of Kroger is pretty common in Texas, but it might be strange to most other Kroger shoppers since it has the very visible exposed upstairs offices above the entryway. Banner looks pretty good at this location as well thanks to it still having a proper floor, but some of the Banner decor does look a bit cheap here. All in all, it's not bad. FWIW, the Tom Thumb does have slightly higher user ratings: https://goo.gl/maps/h6w8jSYbG693k2W5A