The front wall is taken up by a large grab-and-go/prepared foods section (albeit one that seems to be mostly filled with pre-packaged/mass-produced items rather than stuff from the store deli like you see in most grocery stores... though at least in Safeway's case, I'm starting to think that the packaging is a lie and it's all mass-produced regardless, since I never see them actually cooking anything in the store like they used to). I'm not sure how common this is at modern Walmarts, but it does a good job of filling up the excess space here.
Huh, what a strange looking digital scale! I'm not sure what to think about that. While I do like traditional hanging analog weight scales, that form factor looks quite strange with a digital scale.
ReplyDeleteI found a newspaper article today discussing a new-build Walmart which is opening in the outer Houston suburbs next year. The article has a rendering of the exterior of the store provided by Walmart and I find it to be rather odd. The exterior looks a lot like a late 1990s-early 2000s Wal-Mart Supercenter rather than what they were building in the 2010s at the very least. I guess this is good news for people who want to see retro Wal-Mart designs, though Y2K Wal-Marts are hardly things of retro dreams as far as I'm concerned at least. Nightmares, maybe, but not good dreams, lol. Link: https://communityimpact.com/houston/cy-fair/business/2024/09/18/walmart-to-open-newly-built-location-in-cypress-in-2025/
I think those are standard for Walmart, or at least they're what my "local" (Port Angeles) Walmart has. Produce used to be one of those things that my parents would never consider buying from Walmart, but these days Safeway's standards have gone downhill so much (while their prices are only going up) that there's no reason to skip Walmart any longer.
DeleteI believe that is Walmart's standard design these days, basically their 00s "arch model" design with the arches cut off. At least it's marginally better than their mid-2010s design...
Huh, well, I guess we got spoiled by some of the fancier things Walmart was doing in some of the wealthier outer suburbs here in the 2010s like this one! Link: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Sd7vUys8ue8DTjfZ6
DeleteGranted, one could argue that Walmart is quite ugly, but at least it is quite unique from a 25 year old Wal-Mart Supercenter unlike that one opening in 2025!
Yeah, Walmart built a few stores like that in the 2010s (I came across one down in Florida at some point), but they seem to have been a short-lived experiment. I don't mind them going back to their more standard design -- I'm definitely in the "ugly" camp on those experimental stores, especially with their weird expanded-metal grating accents! I actually think the store in the rendering looks relatively decent (though the rendering itself is comically low quality), but nowhere near as nice as their later arch-model stores (the ones with the full glass vestibules similar to that future store). I'm also a little out of touch since Walmart hasn't built a brand-new store around here in years -- in fact, I'm not sure if they've built any since the Port Angeles location, and that one's over 10 years old now! (They have done some odd conversions and expansions since then, but not full new-build stores.)
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