As is common for stores built in the Lifestyle v2 era, this place has a large juice department on the back wall of the produce section -- though here, half of the area under the juice sign is instead taken up by dried fruit and such. I didn't shop stores like this very much growing up; I wonder if they originally had a bit more variety in the juice department, which these days is basically just a ton of bottles of orange juice.
I'm surprised to hear you suggest that this Safeway has a paltry selection of juices because Randall's stores here in Houston, at least the ones I know, generally have less selection of juices than this Safeway! Here is a photo of the South Shore Harbour Randall's as an example. As you can see here, juices are in the same area as dairy and they only take up five refrigerated case doors: https://houstonhistoricretail.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IMG_7640.jpeg
ReplyDeleteThe placement of juices behind produce must be a Northwest thing. Pre-Safeway era Randall's stores generally have juices in the dairy corner on the opposite side of the store from produce, as you see in the above photo, or up near the pharmacy which is also on the complete opposite side of the store. Stores that opened in the Safeway era (not counting Randalbertsons I suppose) generally have juices on the back actionway after meat over towards the opposite side of the store from produce. Old 1970s-80s Safeways here in Houston also had juice near dairy on the back corner of the store on the opposite side from produce.
Yeah, that picture looks very similar to stores built in the Lifestyle v1 era and earlier -- it's only the Lifestyle v2-built ones that have this dedicated juice section. The actual selection here probably isn't much different from that store -- it's just awkwardly stretched out to fill a massively oversized case.
DeleteI'm not surprised -- it seems that the very standardized layout I'm used to in Washington isn't actually common elsewhere (some stores in Oregon, Alaska, and maybe California have the same or similar layout, but I'm not sure if it was ever used elsewhere). Which is always something that feels odd to me since growing up here, it felt like basically every Safeway I ever visited had the same layout, so I always assumed it was a chain-wide thing.