Specifically, the right-hand part of the clothing department has been completely gutted and turned into the new produce department! I imagine Fred Meyer did this because they really want to expand groceries and shrink their general merchandise departments, and it's far from
the most awkward way they've done that, but it still feels quite odd to see Fred Meyer take away one of the few normal things about this store's layout! It's also quite unusual for Fred Meyer's produce departments to have so much wall space, which led to this store having a lot of blank space over here that they tried to fill up with a ton of "Northwest Grown" posters.
I was getting an error in the other post so I'll try posting this here. It is a bit unusual, compared to what I'm used to at Kroger at least, to see Christmas decorations in the produce department! Having produce in the old clothing department is quite strange though. This produce department does look unusually large compared to Kroger produce departments here, even at Marketplace stores (which actually don't feel any bigger than a Kroger Signature store), but maybe just the way it is configured makes it feel bigger. It's a shame to see less general merchandise. With Fred Meyer buying less general merchandise, I wonder if Kroger Marketplace stores will see downsized general merchandise or maybe Fred Meyer stores will match what Kroger Marketplace stores have. My understanding is that Fred Meyer does the general merchandise purchasing for all of Kroger.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say the flooring looks nice here, lol, but I suppose what's here beats tile scarred concrete!
You might have seen me mention it elsewhere, or maybe even here, that HHR is doing a 'Year of Kroger' this year where we feature one local Kroger each month of 2023. This grew out of the idea of celebrating the 30th anniversary of the opening of the first Kroger Signature stores, a monumental move Kroger made back in 1993. January's post went up today. It's not a Signature store, we'll get to those 1993 stores in a couple of months, but it is a Greenhouse store with Food 4 Less/Colorful Value decor! It's also a store that's seen some shifting over the years. This is a shameless plug, but you may want to check it out. It is a neat store: https://houstonhistoricretail.com/2023/01/04/a-warm-greenhouse-welcome-to-the-year-of-kroger-here-at-hhr/
Fred Meyer stores tend to have fairly large produce departments, so this doesn't seem unusual to me. It might look a bit bigger since it's not floating in the middle of the salesfloor, though.
DeleteI believe even the downsized Fred Meyer general merchandise departments are still a good bit larger than those in Kroger Marketplaces, but I've also heard that at least some of those stores have also had their general merchandise departments downsized in recent years.
I'm certainly not going to say this area has great flooring, but it's definitely better than I expected!
You had told me about that series! It's great to see it getting started.