This store was built in 1994 and opened in 1995, but unusually for a 90s Safeway, this one was not actually built by Safeway. It started life as a Max Foods store, a new brand from Olson Foods, a longtime smaller Seattle-area grocery chain. Max Foods was intended to be a larger, warehouse-like chain compared to the traditional Olson Foods brand, from what I've been able to dig up, and supposedly the first location for the brand was what would eventually end up as the Snohomish Haggen. (I say "supposedly" because that store looks exactly like a 90s Haggen and nothing like this store, and the only source I have for it being the same building is a Groceteria post that no one ever replied to, so I'm not feeling super confident that that's completely accurate.) Right around the time this store opened in 1994, Olson Foods announced that they were selling almost all of their stores to QFC, but still keeping Max Foods and some unspecified other operations; less than a year later, they were down to just two Max Foods locations (this one and one in Lynnwood which I haven't been able to track down, but may well have been this store, now a Trader Joe's after Safeway moved to the former Albertsons across the street... I actually have both the Trader Joe's and the new Safeway in my backlog, and I almost decided to post them today!), both of which were sold to Safeway in February 1995.
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