Meat gives way to dairy in the back left corner, where the old-fashioned cases resume (though the coffin case is being used for meat -- it's pretty unusual to see Safeway use them for dairy these days). Unsurprisingly, there's no walk-in milk box here, with milk instead being in the open cases along the back wall.
My local Randall's has rather small cases for both milk and especially eggs. The combination of the small milk and egg cases means that Randall's does keep coffin coolers in the dairy niche (an old pre-Safeway buyout common design used by Randall's) for popular milk and egg items...usually items which are in the weekly ad. Randall's also puts some of the markdown dairy items in the coffin cooler and that could be a strange combination of stuff like cream cheese and big bottles of milk.
ReplyDeleteThe dairy niche does have milk cases with doors, but the doors are probably from the 1990s or maybe even the 1980s with their brass/brass-like handles and such! You can see what I'm talking about here, eggs are in the little case where the Styrofoam coolers are up top (I told you it was small!). You can then see the brass door milk cases and the coffin cooler where I think you can make out some bottles of milk. This is probably not a common design at all at the Safeways in your area! Link: https://houstonhistoricretail.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Randalls-Champions-Forest_2970-scaled.jpeg
And, yes, the same doors and setup are still around now that the store has Colorful Lifestyle v2.
A lot of Safeways have small egg cases that are very similar to that one, either as an endcap or right next to the milk walk-in. Others have them just in the main dairy aisle with everything else -- I'm not sure which style is more common. But the specific design of egg case in this store is quite odd for Safeway!
DeleteIt used to be fairly common for Safeway to have coffin cases in dairy, but most of them have been replaced with mid-height multi-level cases. It's pretty weird that they just reused this one for the meat department, but maybe it has always been that way -- who knows.
Those brass doors are quite an odd sight for Safeway! I've seen plenty of Safeways with ancient cases, but they typically used silver doors which don't look quite so dated these days.