Ignoring the terrible case of aisle marker wasting disease going on in the background for a second, this end of the store is where the category markers get really interesting. Starting off, we have an "Office Depot School Supply" marker -- I honestly didn't even know Albertsons ever had some sort of marketing arrangement with Office Depot until I visited this store; apparently, it started in 2003, before the Supervalu era, and judging by how little information I can find on it and how rare these signs seem to be, I'm guessing Supervalu killed off the arrangement not long following their takeover of Albertsons.
Huh, I had no idea Office Depot had a marketing deal with Albertsons. At least here in Texas, Safeway had a deal with OfficeMax some years back where Safeway sold OfficeMax brand items in their stores. I know Safeway had that agreement with OfficeMax in other states as well, but I don't know if the NW was a part of that.
ReplyDeleteGiven the Office Depot-OfficeMax merger and the Albertsons-Safeway merger, it would have been interesting if these agreements were still in place!
Huh, I never knew about that OfficeMax-Safeway deal! I don't believe Safeway had much of an office supply selection in those days, compared to what Albertsons had, and they tend to have even less now.
DeleteI suppose the NW wasn't part of that Safeway-OfficeMax deal then. Maybe OfficeMax wasn't as prominent in the NW as they were here?
DeleteSafeway has never had a lot of office supplies, but they did carry more during the OfficeMax days. I'm not so sure how willing shoppers were to buy OfficeMax brand items though, but surely some of them were just fine. It was odd seeing OfficeMax stuff at Randall's!
Here is a little media blurb about it: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/retail-roundup-m-commerce-expands-officemax-and-safeway-partner-and-more/
OfficeMax wasn't particularly big around here in those days, but then again, neither was Office Depot, really. Of course, I was still quite young in 2008, so it's possible that I just completely missed it like I did with the Albertsons-Office Depot thing!
DeleteWow, cool find!
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