These old Grocery Palaces always seem to have a messy front end due to all of the random displays taking up what used to be the photo and video departments. Some of that space has been reused for Drive Up and Go, including a rather out-of-place red wall in the back of what I'm guessing was originally the video rental alcove. The checkouts here are original to the store, but with newer generic register lights intended to have periodically-updated advertisements in them -- as with all Northwest Albertsons, these are frozen in time, with most of them having the "It's Just Better" slogan used immediately after the merger and the one on the end still showing a "Card Free Savings" ad from well before the merger (Albertsons went back to requiring a card for sale prices very soon after the merger, so this sign has been inaccurate for many years now -- some divisions have dropped cards again in recent years, but none of the west coast divisions are part of that).
The Southern Division is quite strange when it comes to card requirements. Tom Thumb still requires a card for discounts, but Randall's and Albertsons stores do not. This includes Albertsons stores in the DFW area where they neighbor Tom Thumb stores. Unlike in Portland, Albertsons and Tom Thumb still maintain separate ads in DFW due the difference in card requirements even though the prices and sales are otherwise the same between the two.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Randall's, I was at my local Randall's the other day and took a good look at the shrunken Colorful Lifestyle v2 decor in the meat department. I think, or I would assume, it is the same lettering that was used when the store had regular Lifestyle v2. The letters sit very close to eye-level in the meat department (talk about a need for downsized Lifestyle decor!) so I could get a good look at them. One thing I noticed is that the lettering isn't really straight or flush at all when you look at it up close, but from a distance, it looks pretty normal. Perhaps Safeway came up with some way of mounting those Lifestyle letters such that they didn't necessarily have to be straight to look straight. Albertsons back in the day could have used lessons in that and Kroger still can use those lessons! Of course, there comes a point when the letters are falling off, or have fallen off, that there's no way to make it look right, lol.
Interesting! In the early days of the merger (before card requirements were brought back to Albertsons), they still ran a combined ad around here and just had a note saying "card not required at Albertsons" or something along those lines. Seems like a simpler solution than the mess they're doing in Tom Thumb territory!
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