The cards/gifts/party section at this store is surprisingly large (I don't believe Safeway or Albertsons ever had anything nearly this elaborate in their Northwest stores, and they've cut what little they had back to just a quarter-aisle at most in basically every store I've visited lately) and surprisingly prominent, with special shelving and flooring. The gifts and knickknacks over here are another thing that regular Safeways don't seem to carry at all -- it's probably mostly overflow seasonal stuff since what they had on this visit was all gardening related, but Safeway massively cut back their seasonal offerings to be almost exclusively food items around the time of the Albertsons merger, so I can't imagine many of their stores selling things like this at all. (Though it seems they may be going back on that -- I noticed a large display of fans and even portable air conditioners at my Safeway this weekend, and that's a smaller-than-normal Safeway!)
Did any of the Albertsons in the NW have the Blue & Green Awnings decor package with the cards & gifts room? It was a bit of an odd thing at the time, but it wasn't the only odd thing about Awnings. Here's a Food Town in Houston which still has Albertsons' Awnings card room with all the decor intact, but Food Town uses it for their soda department: https://houstonhistoricretail.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Food-Town-Albertsons-Meyerland-Party-Soda-scaled.jpeg
ReplyDeleteI can't say if they ever did since I haven't ever visited an Awnings store, but I've never seen anything like that! I think some stores around here turned their video rental departments into something like that, but they never had real decor, and the removal of the video rental departments wasn't until well after Awnings was done.
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