The pharmacy is also in its typical Safeway spot, the middle of the back wall -- I'm guessing it was Safeway that added this, since I haven't seen any references to Olson/Max Foods having pharmacies, and it would have been a little strange for them to have one in a shopping center co-anchored by a drugstore. The lunch meats department next door is a much stranger sight (I know some of you find having the pharmacy next to the meat department as in Safeway's standard northwest layout a bit unusual, but this store has it right in the middle of the meat section!), and I suspect pretty much everything from that to the left was still the original Max Foods configuration.
Interestingly enough, it was very common for Safeway to build their Super Stores, with pharmacies of course, in shopping centers with other drug stores here in Houston in the 1970s and 1980s! Safeway and Eckerd were the usual combo and, indeed, my local Safeway Super Store was in a shopping center with an Eckerd. I can think of another nearby shopping center where Safeway, Eckerd, and Kmart all co-existed with each having a pharmacy!
ReplyDeleteBack in the 1980s, when drug stores still wanted to be in shopping centers, it was pretty common for them to be in shopping centers with grocers that had pharmacies as well. Randall's had a number of locations like that (in the pre-Safeway days, of course). It was less likely to happen at Kroger locations until after 1981 when Kroger closed their SupeRx locations here.
I know that out west, some of the drug store chains operated very large stores relative to what we had here in Houston with the exception of the Sav-Ons, Drug Emporiums, and Phar-Mors of the world...none of whom lasted very long here (Sav-On lasted the longest). Granted, Walgreens did run the Globe discount store chain out of Houston and those were Kmart-sized Walgreens stores, but I guess that doesn't count since those were truly discount department stores with a pharmacy rather than a pharmacy with a lot of general merchandise like what was normal out in your part of the world.
Interesting! I thought stores/shopping centers tended to avoid that sort of direct competition back then, but I guess I was wrong!
DeleteThose giant stores didn't last very long around here either. I believe Payless was the only major chain building supersized drugstores (there was also Drug Emporium obviously, but they were quite short-lived and I don't believe there were a ton of their stores locally), and Rite Aid shut that down as soon as they took over (one of the Rite Aids that I grew up with, which is about to close down, was in half of an old Payless which they subdivided very quickly after they took over). Pay 'n Save's stores (which became Payless shortly before the Rite Aid takeover) tended to be around the size of a typical modern drugstore, perhaps a little bit bigger, so they probably seemed big when they were built but they were nowhere near the size of those monster Paylesses that were larger than the typical grocery store of the time!