There's certainly an
interesting selection of products in the promotional part of the store, especially with the occasional produce display mixed in! Of course, even more interesting to me is the flooring -- while I'm not good at remembering exactly which department the different flooring designs went to, it's still super cool to see them hanging on like this. Less cool is the fact that it looks like these floors haven't been cleaned since Haggen left, or perhaps even earlier than that!
Given how Kroger loves to rip up tile floors for terribly tile scarred concrete, especially at Krogertsons locations, I'm quite lucky that not only does the local Grocery Palace Krogertsons still have the original Grocery Palace floor with the wood in the bakery, the roads, stars, and blocks, but it's actually in very good condition for a 20 year old floor. Some of the similarly aged Millennium-era flooring at other Kroger locations is not in as good of shape as the Albertsons flooring. I'm not sure if that is due to better maintenance or what.
ReplyDeleteMany of those products are the staples I see at Hispanic grocers around here. I've seen those bottles of Cloralen bleach for sale at Hispanic grocers for years now and I've wondered if it is as good as Clorox and such. The bottles are very distinctive looking!
That must be an odd-looking store, with Kroger decor and Grocery Palace flooring! There are a lot of Safeways out here with similarly old flooring, as Safeway tends to just replace the perimeter flooring (if they do any flooring work at all) when remodeling stores; most of them still look good, but I have seen a few with worn out flooring. Nothing near as bad as this store, however!
DeleteInteresting to hear that! The strangeness here, in my mind, isn't in the specific products as much as the product mix -- most grocery stores wouldn't mix displays of bleach and other cleaning products in with displays of chips and soda and such!
I was actually at the Grocery Palace Krogertsons just today in fact! It's quite close to where I live. Unfortunately, the photos of the store on Google are quite poor mostly because someone posted a ton of photos of a different Kroger with the Script decor which is not the Krogertsons in question which now has Bountiful. It's a good looking store, but their inventory is a bit less than it should be for a store the size of a Grocery Palace store. This Albertsons had a Fred Meyer-style indoor-outdoor garden center. When Kroger first took over this store, the indoor part was converted into a short-lived Kroger Dollar Store. Here's one photo from Google which shows the bakery wood, the stars, and a little bit of the road flooring: https://goo.gl/maps/MJaMHq3jAfwgUiDb8
DeleteAs you can see, it looks good, but the rear wall is very strange for a Kroger with separate semi-walled in areas for juices, the bakery, lunch meats, seafood, meat, and then the dairy.
It does seem that some Hispanic grocers (though not so much Fiesta Mart, but they do it at some locations as well) like to keep a part of the store for palletized sale items. It's kind of an a 'valley of savings' type area. The El Rancho I went to in the old Randall's had this in the area up front in between the registers and the pharmacy where I suppose the florist would normally be and maybe also the over the counter medications. Here's an image of it along with the leased areas up front. Can you believe this was a 2000s era Safeway/Randall's? https://goo.gl/maps/UtmrYer4pQSypBpR9
Wow, that is quite an odd looking store! The somewhat-low drop ceiling makes it not even really look like a Grocery Palace store, apart from the flooring (obviously) and most of the layout (those alcoves are definitely one of the many strange choices made with the Grocery Palace layout!).
DeleteThat store is certainly far more colorful than any Safeway from that era! 😃 Pallet drops like that certainly aren't something Safeway (or really any mainstream grocery store I've visited) typically does!
Now that you mention it, that drop ceiling is almost certainly something that Kroger installed. I'm pretty sure the Albertsons had an open ceiling or else the giant hanging props wouldn't have worked too well. Kroger at that time was still building stores with drop ceilings so maybe they wanted that here, I'm not sure. The ceiling doesn't feel too low when you're in the store. It's actually a nice place to shop, but the half aisles are very strange for a pre-Marketplace Kroger and are certainly an Albertsons carryover. This place feels like a Kroger in some ways, but in other ways, it feels like something quite different!
DeleteIt was pretty common for Kroger to maintain Albertsons' store layouts. In fact, Kroger also did this with Safeways they took over. Thus, we have some Krogers here in Houston with very odd layouts!
The funny thing about that Randall's was that it was known for being a very dark store as Lifestyle v1/v2 stores often were with the spot lighting and such. With El Rancho's vibrant colors, it is a brighter looking store even if the lighting there is still a bit less than ideal.