Happy new year, everyone! To start off 2024, I decided to go with my favorite local store visit of 2023, which also happens to be the most recent set in my backlog. I've wanted to visit this store for ages, but it's a massive pain in the neck to get here without a car, since it's just across the county line into Pierce County where the bus system is somewhat pathetic and the route to get here runs only on weekdays and only in the peak direction, leaving me no choice but to come here on a holiday afternoon and then walk all the way back to the King County line where bus service starts up again. But it was totally worth it, since this store is super cool, as we'll see shortly!
Happy 2024! It is kind of funny that you're starting the new year off with a Haggen because Haggen has been in the national news quite a bit recently due to the failure of Haggen running the stores they got from previous divestments and how that relates to the Kroger-Albertsons merger. You may still be in this set when we get word from the FTC about them probably rejecting the merger (a decision should be made public in the next couple of weeks) and then we'll have to see what the courts decide.
ReplyDeleteGiven the lack of Subarus in the parking lot here, I knew this must be over towards Tacoma and, indeed, that's what it is! There must be something to this, it happens too often for it to just be a coincidence, lol.
I do have one Safeway oddball topic which I marked as 'discuss with NW Retail when he returns from vacation,' lol. Have you ever seen a Safeway with quasi-Lifestyle? Mike and I found some photos of a Randall's in Houston which closed in around 2019 and was transferred to El Rancho back when Albertsons was involved with El Rancho. It's still an El Rancho today. Anyway, based on the photos, the store seems to have a hybrid 1990s Randall's pre-Safeway merger decor package that was somewhat Lifestyle-ized/Proto-Lifestyle-ized in a weird hybrid way. Not even all the aisle markers are the same here, some are Proto-Lifestyle and some are pre-Safeway Randall's aisle markers! You can also see that Safeway never took down the old Randall's coffee bar walls at this location so it had an enclosed dining area up until the time it closed! The fact this store existed like this until 2019 shows why Safeway got a bit of a reputation for doing things on the cheap here in Houston, lol. Link: https://maps.app.goo.gl/1mvLvMHwvUWmzaUc6
Speaking of Houston, the UW Huskies will be in town to try to win the football championship. Hopefully any UW fans in town will skip the horribly tile scarred Krogertsons near the stadium and will go to one of the Randall's not far from the stadium instead, lol. Anyway, I'm glad UW beat Texas and hopefully they beat Michigan as well, those Big Ten fans have big heads and it would be nice to see the Pac-12 remind them of who the boss is once the Pac-12 teams join the Big Ten, lol.
If you think this is a little on-the-nose when it comes to Haggen's expansion ambitions, just wait for what I have planned for this weekend! 🙂
DeleteJust a couple miles from the King County line and the cars are already starting to look Tacoma-like! 😃
I have seen exactly one store like that before, one I visited on my California trip with a weirdly repainted Pastel Arches package. The Proto-Lifestyle aisle markers in that store are another level of oddness, though, since the wall paint is clearly from the normal Lifestyle era! I wonder if they took them from some store that was closing, and perhaps there weren't enough to replace all of the original ones, but I'm grasping at straws here. Over on Flickr, the SoCal Supermarket Blogger recently posted a set showing a Vons store that recently received a similar(ly awful) repaint from Lifestyle v1 to something approximating Modern, so I guess Safeway's cheapness isn't quite gone yet!
It will be interesting to see how that game goes! Both Michigan and the Huskies barely won their games on Monday, with the Huskies really trying to lose at the literal last minute, so I don't know what's going to happen this time.