At least the decor designers found a use for the random soffits, sticking a giant Haggen logo and the traditional "serving since" sign (a rare sight at Safeway these days) there. Haggen has long been a company that loves to paste their logo all over their stores, but this package takes that to an extreme level!
I think the death of "serving since" at Safeway stores is mainly a Seattle area thing, or in other areas where Modern is common, because "serving since" is alive and well even at our recently renovated Colorful Lifestyle v2 Randall's! Also, the recently renovated Lifestyle v3 Safeway and Albertsons in Oregon still have "serving since" around.
ReplyDeleteThe bananas display here looks kind of cheap. I guess they were going for a bit of a farmer's market feel, but it just doesn't work with the bananas. Also, if those produce displays have prices on them, they are certainly hidden quite well! That probably isn't a good thing as far as Haggen's prices go or else they'd be advertising their prices quite proudly!
Was this store built in 1998? That's around the time when supermarket design really started going off the rails. As I once heard from an insider, that was around the period when the industry trend was to put less focus (cheapen) the store itself while emphasizing the activities of the service departments and putting the focus on food rather than the store itself. There were some really oddball designs around that time. Some, like Grocery Palace, worked better than others (HEB's grocery maze was a disaster), but in general, I liked traditional layouts better. It seemed grocers got the hint in the mid-2000s and started to go back to some traditional designs (Safeway Lifestyle really comes to mind here), but then the cheapskate designs came back and now the 'Sam's Club' look is back in favor again. Ugh. For this Haggen at least, it appears the Sam's Club look maybe never went away!
Yeah, Lifestyle-family decor packages still have "serving since" signs, but I believe they're the only ones left. Legacy and Heritage both have similar elements, but not quite the same (and neither are in particularly common use currently), and I don't think any of the myriad other decor packages currently in use across the Albertsons universe have anything like that.
DeleteI think these are the same cheap displays Haggen used in their short-lived acquired stores, which have never been a great look! As far as pricing goes, Haggen is definitely one of the most expensive stores around here, far pricier than normal Safeways.
Yeah, this store is definitely from that crazy era, and I'd definitely put it in the "disaster" category! Since it was originally under the Top Foods brand, it was probably on the cheaper side from the start, to differentiate it from normal Haggen stores. Then again, that deluxe Haggen we looked at last year was also a Top Foods originally... I'm not sure what Haggen's strategy with Top Foods really was, and I'm pretty sure Haggen wasn't sure either!