I wonder what all the space in front of the checkouts was originally used for. It's unlikely that the registers were ever up here, since the whole point of the security windows is to look down at them, if I'm not mistaken. These days, it's home to the customer service counter, Newport's only Starbucks (that's how you know this is really a small town!), and a whole bunch of open space where the video rental section would have been.
The question about what would have been here before is certainly a good one because I actually don't know! Our 1980 Safeways had the entrance/exit doors right at the center of the front of the store so the layout is probably different than what this store had since the doors are on the sides of the front here. One thing our Safeways had at the front was the cart area. They had the fold-up carts so they didn't take a ton of room, but they certainly did store them indoors. One of our 1980 Safeways in this area actually had a bank in the front! If I remember correctly, the customer service booth at our 1980 Safeways was on the side of the registers.
ReplyDeleteIf you think this setup is strange, wait until you see November's The Year of Kroger post where I'll be looking at a Krogway that opened as a Safeway in 1987, just mere months, weeks even, before Safeway left Houston. After being AppleTree for a few years, it became a Kroger. Anyway, it has the strangest design you've surely ever seen for a major chain supermarket and it really dates back to the initial design Safeway designed the store to have which Kroger is continuing all these years later. It was a bit of a new design Safeway was experimenting with in 1987. It doesn't just have a security catwalk, but two of them, an inner one and an outer one! There's a lot more weirdness at this Krogway than just that so you'll have to wait to see it next month!
Interesting! Maybe the whole front end was reconfigured at some point, since there are plenty of other things that don't seem original about this store. I've been to other Safeways from this era with doors on the sides like this store, but they didn't have all this extra space up in the front here.
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