The overall look of the department
has changed significantly, however, with pretty much all of the upscale design elements stripped out. I imagine the photo department is a lot less significant than before -- the desk is still there, but it's largely surrounded by more housewares overflow -- but it does still have its own sign, surprisingly.
In some ways, the old decor here looked more modern than the new Banner decor! It certainly looked fancier. I wonder why they even put a sign for the 'Photo Center'. Do they even do anything with photo finishing or cameras here? I do see some computers that look like they are for the customers to use, but I don't know if those are digital photo print kiosks or what.
ReplyDeleteI recently found some photo envelopes of mine hiding in a drawer. I didn't realize I had done this, but it seems I had given Kroger an SD card and had them print some photos for me in 2005. The receipt in the bag that I'm sure the store was supposed to take out indicates that Kroger used a mail-away 3rd party service to do this, but the end results are very good. The quality of the prints are excellent. I used a 4mp Nikon at the time, but I don't think photos taken with a new camera would look any better on 4x6" prints like that. So, yeah, at least at one time, Kroger did have a good digital photo finishing service, but I don't think they've offered that here in years.
I'm pretty sure those computers are the old employee computers/registers(?) from before the remodel, which don't seem to be used anymore. Perhaps they were used as a photo kiosk at some point, but either way, they don't seem to be used for anything anymore.
DeleteFred Meyer does actually still have a digital photo printing service, but I think it's mostly outsourced at this point and it doesn't have much presence in the physical stores. Still, they do include a "photo center" sign in most remodels (at least in the Banner era -- things might have changed with Artisan), for some reason.