Welcome to London Drugs!

As I mentioned yesterday, today's post will be a quick look at one of the chains that I'm hoping to feature quite a bit next year. London Drugs is a Vancouver-area chain that, as the name indicates, was originally started as a pharmacy/drugstore chain, but added a significant amount of general merchandise products over the years, with a particular focus on electronics that makes their stores feel like a Walgreens with half of a Radio Shack tacked on! That part is interesting enough, but their main point of interest for me is how incredibly retro so many of their stores are.

 This store's facade certainly fits the bill for retro design, but I was highly disappointed when I stepped through the doors to find that it had recently received London Drug's very bland current decor package, making it look not unlike a run-of-the-mill Walgreens or CVS down in the US. I almost gave up completely on this store, but I quite liked how some of my exterior pictures turned out, so I decided that while interior photos weren't worth my time (I do have pictures of this decor package in a much more interesting store), I would throw together a quick blog post sometime when I needed filler (which ended up being today!) featuring them along with some interior photos pulled from Google Maps and Yelp.  

Since these aren't my own pictures, I'm not entirely sure where within the store everything is. I think this is somewhat close to the view you would get entering through the doors on the right-hand side of the building. I also don't know much about the history of this store, but the interior and exterior design both scream 80s to me; the interior here is generally similar to that found in many other vintage London Drugs locations with the major exception of the sloped ceiling sign elements, which don't appear to have survived in any other locations (if they were ever used elsewhere -- it's possible this was a prototype that was simplified into the more common version).

The right side of the store is home to the typical drugstore stuff -- health and beauty, the pharmacy, and the large cosmetics and perfumes counter that is common at London Drugs (certainly a more elaborate setup than most drugstores have today). The sign boxes here were large light fixtures, but it doesn't appear that the signs themselves lit up -- instead, they appear to have mirrored letters. The use of a sort of dark pink color for perfumes/cosmetics and blue for most of the rest of the store is another thing this store had in common with the more common retro London Drugs decor. 

The more interesting part of the store is probably the left side, however, home to the electronics section, along with other general merchandise stuff in the background. The other part of the decor here that I haven't come across elsewhere, and which I wish I had been able to find a better picture of, is the painted graphics along the back wall -- some other London Drugs stores had similar, but much simpler, graphics. And yes, those aisle markers have mirrors behind the numbers! 

I'm guessing this area was originally home to an electronics service desk, similar to the cosmetics one on the other side of the store. You can just barely see the "prescriptions" sign for the pharmacy department in the background, which looks quite similar to ones I've seen elsewhere, but oddly looks like it might be lacking neon.

I love the backlit, extremely 80s "1 Hour Photo" sign here! This is another thing I saw elsewhere, but I don't believe I got such a good closeup of it.

Clearly, cameras and photo accessories were originally a major focus of London Drugs' electronics department! And even today, they have a lot more photo stuff than I've seen anywhere but a dedicated photo store in many years, though part of the cases shown here were instead filled with assorted odds and ends, from what I can see. 

And last but not least, here's a random photo near the front end somewhere -- I'm not entirely sure how this store's layout worked, since this seems to be a separate area in front of the main salesfloor. That brick flooring is another classic London Drugs thing that we'll be seeing in the future! 

I'm probably going to make London Drugs one of my first sets in the new year, but until then, I hope you all enjoyed this little teaser! I don't normally like to recycle other people's pictures on here, but I decided it was worth it this once.