I'm going to blame the weird angle of this picture on the extreme crowds that were present in this aisle. Anyway, for some reason, the other sign in the dairy aisle is "pure & wholesome", which (as the photo implies) is supposed to be used in the milk section; meanwhile, the "fresh dairy" sign that is above the milk case is typically used as a secondary dairy sign in stores with that on the wall, like this one. I wonder if this was intentional, or if the installers just mixed them up on the fly. (And I have to say, the energy drinks on the top shelf are in no way "pure"
or "wholesome"!)
Maybe Safeway got confused and thought Muscle Milk was real milk! As for what is pure & wholesome about a Mountain Dew energy drink, well, I suppose it might be pure rubbish. Wholesome though, I don't know!
ReplyDeleteI'm doing what any reasonable person would do tonight...I'm reading old retail annual reports at the University of Washington Library website! I know we've mentioned these before. The 1984 Pay 'n Save one is an interesting one: https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/reports/id/14922/rec/17
It seems that Pay 'n Save started their own wholesale membership club stores called Price Savers Warehouse. These were sold to Kroger, Kroger!, in 1985. By 1988, they were sold to a management-led group. In 1991, Kmart brought the stores and converted them to Kmart's Pace warehouse stores. Of course, Wal-Mart brought Pace in 1993. That's an interesting history involving Kroger, Kmart, and Wal-Mart! Pay 'n Save built some Price Savers Warehouse stores in the Northwest so I wonder if those were Kroger's first foray into the Northwest?
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DeleteHuh, I never knew that Price Savers was owned by Pay 'n Save or Kroger! One of those former Price Savers (in north Seattle) stuck around as a Sam's Club until just a few years ago when Walmart closed all three Seattle-area Sam's Clubs. Costco was looking at buying it back in 2020 or 2021, but that seems to have fallen through, which is too bad as it would have been cool to have the same building go through Price Savers, Pace, Sam's Club, and Costco!
I never knew Kroger had anything in the Northwest prior to buying Fred Meyer (which had recently bought QFC) in 1998! I was able to confirm, through the Seattle Times archive, that it was apparently Kroger's first attempt at entering the Northwest market; clearly it wasn't particularly successful for them, and it seems like quite an odd idea for a company with no other local presence to buy a chain with only four stores, spread between Anchorage, Seattle, Tacoma, and Salt Lake City! But I suppose Kroger was making a lot of strange decisions in the 80s that didn't end up panning out.