Welcome to the *new* U District Safeway!

One of the very first stores I ever posted was the original U District Safeway, which at that point was one of the oldest stores in the entire chain, and definitely one of the smallest and just generally worst Safeways in Seattle, to the point that when I lived in the U District, I would walk the couple miles to the Roosevelt store rather than shopping here. Well, even back when I posted that, there were plans to replace this store, and it finally closed in 2021 to be rebuilt as the first of Safeway's 2020s mixed-use redevelopments in Seattle. Construction of the new store took quite a while, but it finally opened on June 21st (or maybe 24th?) of this year, and I visited it (completely by chance!) on June 25th, just over a month ago. 

I completely wasn't intending to visit this store when I did, especially since I had no clue that it had actually opened, but I swung by the old U Village store on the way home from a bike ride (that's my bike on the rack across the street!), only to find it had already closed, with a sign directing people to this new store, stating it would open on June 24th (though the signs at this store said June 21st instead). It was always the plan for this store to replace both the old U District and U Village Safeways, from what I can tell, and Safeway even sold that store to a developer several years ago, but I had been expecting them to wait to close it until after the new one opened -- instead, they did the exact opposite, with the U Village store closing nearly a month earlier from what I can tell. I may or may not tack those pictures onto the end of this set.