In theory, the produce department itself is completely standard for a Lifestyle store in the late 2010s, but it has a real Albertsons vibe in this picture. I think it's the high raised ceiling and harsh florescent lighting (both of which I don't really associate with Lifestyle-era Safeway). The stockroom door right in the middle of the produce wall is also much more common at Albertsons (Safeway normally places produce directly against the exterior wall, with the back room actually being at the back of the store), as is the placement of the deli adjacent to produce. If I didn't know this store's history, I might have thought it was an early Albertsons closure!
I'm going to be off for the next few days (taking a long weekend around the holiday), so I'll be back here Sunday or Monday! I was originally planning to take my Vancouver vacation around this time, but it turned out to be all but impossible to find a reasonably-priced hotel in Vancouver during the summer, so it's just another trip back home for me.
Huh, that is pretty strange having the stockroom door right under the 'fresh from the fields' sign. It looks rather cheap to see that. I've seen open ceiling Lifestyle v2 stores before and I never think they look very good (hooray for Safeway putting in a drop ceiling at my local Grocery Palace Randalbertsons!), but this really looks pretty bad combined with that strange door location.
ReplyDeleteLifestyle looks great in stores which look upscale...hence not ones with warehouse ceilings. Well, that's my opinion at least, lol. In my experience, the open ceiling stores often looked darker than the drop ceiling stores with dark ceiling tiles which only makes the dark and dingy stereotypes about Lifestyle v1/v2 even worse! Anyway, door, wall height, and ceiling stuff aside, this installation of Lifestyle does look pretty normal and looks pretty good.
I've seen the hotel prices in Vancouver and I don't blame you. You could have taken a bargain trip to Vancouver, WA instead, but really the hotels there aren't exactly cheap either at least if they are priced similarly to what they were last year!
Yeah, this whole thing is weird -- but just wait until you see what this store looks like today!
DeleteThis is far from the worst implementation of Lifestyle I've seen, but it's not all that great! At least the Seattle Division avoided the cheap versions of Lifestyle v2 that some other divisions liked to use in stores like this one.
Hotels are rather expensive everywhere these days! Well, in North America at least -- I was happy to find that Italy still had cheap hotels! Last time I looked at Vancouver, I found that 3 nights there was going to cost me more than the whole week of hotels in Italy did.