Into the parking garage

The layout of this store was always going to be strange because of how long and skinny the lot is, but Safeway made it even weirder by putting the ramp to the parking garage right in the middle of the store. I have no clue why they decided to do this, since they developed the store themselves from the ground up so there isn't an obvious reason that they couldn't have shifted it a bit further south to make the salesfloor one continuous space. I went looking to see if I could find a floor plan for the store and found this, which shows a layout for the store that is not even remotely close to what was actually built, which is pretty interesting! It even shows a different collection of service departments to what the store ended up with, but I'm getting ahead of myself. One thing that is accurate there is that this store has no stockroom on its main level; instead, it's on the second floor behind the courtyard, and I believe some of the service department prep areas are there too. That seems like it would be very inconvenient for the employees! 

It's also notable that the parking garage entrance is about the fanciest part of this store's interior, with the wood ceiling finally providing a break from the sea of grey.