Everything is basically normal in this part of the meat department, apart from the category plaques still being just propped up against the woodgrain case header. The ones along the back wall are a bit of a mess, and the mismatched cases (leading to an abrupt transition in the middle) don't help either!
I don't know if this meat area is in a niche along the wall or if the pharmacy bump-out only makes this look like a niche, but this looks like something more like an Albertsons Grocery Palace meats arrangement than anything Safeway that I know! Around here at least in old Safeways or Safeway-era Randall's, the pharmacy would also never be in that position. At least I've never seen that. This all looks very strange.
ReplyDeleteThe non-affixed plaques looks just as shabby here as it does in the produce area. It's very strange they left things like that.
I'll leave it up to you whether to consider the pharmacy a bump-out or the meat and dairy departments to be alcoves -- I go back and forth on that myself!
DeleteI've heard that before that people find this layout strange, but this was the layout Safeway used in basically every store they built in the northwest from the 90s through the early 2010s, so it makes up the majority of Safeways (and maybe even the majority of major grocery stores outright) in this part of the world. (I know it may not feel that way from this blog since I tend to highlight the more unusual stores.) Having grown up shopping at Safeways all around the region -- and even some in Canada -- that mostly had this same general layout, anything else feels wrong to me!