The weirdest part of this store, has to be the produce department, which is floating in the middle of the store, basically forming a triple aisle. And as Lifestyle v1 never had any hanging signage that I know of (something that both
Proto-Lifestyle and
Lifestyle v2 [scroll up a few pictures for the Lifestyle v3 version] had), this department went completely unsigned (though at least it does have woodgrain flooring, and would have originally had X-lights, to identify it). Strangely, when they removed those X-lights, they just left the original spotlights rather than replacing them with brighter, standard lights, leaving this area darker than ever -- the opposite of Safeway's habit of brightening up their stores in the Albertsons era!
Wow, I can only imagine how dark this part of the store must be given my experiences in some Safeway-built Randall's stores from this era. Also, are those illuminated shelves on the bottom part of the produce displays? I can't say I've seen that before, but maybe it only really stands out because of how dark the produce area is in general.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it was as dim as when Safeway first rolled out Lifestyle, but it was quite a bit closer than that to what I'm used to!
DeleteYes, they are! Those rounded-end fixtures were installed at the same time as the big refresh, and are generally used for organic produce; they're the only ones that have lighting like that in typical Safeways. Originally they would have been installed perpendicular to how they are here, dividing the produce department in half, but when Safeway reset their produce departments to eliminate the diagonal arrangement, they often rotated them to be like this.