Save-On seems to have mostly kept the deli here operating as it did in the Safeway days, including the corner sandwich station that is so common in Lifestyle stores in the Seattle area. This store (and I believe most other Canada Safeways) had a significantly larger prepared foods selection than the stores I was used to growing up, including an Asian food section that I remember being quite good.
I recently learned that some of the last Safeways Safeway built in Houston before they left town in 1987 were built with BBQ smokehouses inside the stores. One of these locations was near me, and I shopped there, but it opened as a new-built store in January 1987 and was closed by July 1987...even before Safeway left Houston. Hopefully you can forgive me for forgetting some of the details about this store, lol. Another, maybe the only other, opened in February 1987 and managed to stick around for conversion to AppleTree and then (and now) Kroger. This store has one of the strangest, most mind-boggling layouts you'll ever see and it is a legacy of the store's Safeway design. This will be a future The Year of Kroger subject as you can well imagine!
ReplyDeleteWow, a whole smokehouse in the store? I've seen a lot of interesting grocery store things over the years, but that's one of the strangest!
DeleteYep! My best guess is that this was Safeway's attempt at implementing something like China Express in Houston/Texas, but with something which might have more local appeal. We'll never really know if it was successful or not because Safeway had one leg, and probably more than that, in the grave in Texas by the time those two stores opened in 1987!
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