This store doesn't just have sideways aisles -- it has some diagonal aisles too! Shelving going in all sorts of directions was a total 90s/early 00s thing (think Albertsons Blue & Grey Market, Rite Aid's Diamond Windows stores, and the like) -- I'm glad that grocery chains eventually realized that people want stores that are predictable and easy to navigate, not a confusing maze. (That's why I liked Safeway so much in the Lifestyle era -- almost all of their stores followed basically the same layout, and they never did anything too crazy with it apart from the diagonal produce displays.)
A few months ago, I went to a Kroger I had not been to in about a decade. It is a Y2K era Kroger Signature store which itself is hardly unusual for Houston Kroger stores. However, unlike almost every other similar Signature store, Kroger did not remove the combination north-south and east-west aisle orientation that almost all of those 1990s-early 2000s Signature stores had originally. Shopping in a Kroger store with that Albertsons' Blue & Gray Market-like layout here in the 2020s was certainly strange and as disorienting as it was back in the 1990s-2000s!
ReplyDeleteWithout question, the worst layouts I've ever seen were HEB's stores in the early 2000s (both their full-line stores and Pantry Foods stores). They had a maze-like design where they basically strictly dictated which aisles you were going to go through. Aside from the obvious annoyances of this type of design, it also created many choke points in parts of the store that were busy. While it is obvious from a sales perspective why HEB would do such a thing, it must have proven unpopular because HEB watered down the design by the late 2000s and then watered it down even more in the 2010s+. That said, their stores still have by far the worst layouts of any of the supermarkets here. The bigger modern HEBs are in some ways worse than the smaller ones as the smaller ones have a bit more of a traditional layout.
Safeway's 1980s stores here in Houston had a pretty standard supermarket layout, at least as far as the center aisles and the perishable staples go, and so they were pleasant places to shop even compared to the slightly odd for their time layouts of Greenhouse Krogers. Safeway has kept the original Randall's layouts of their acquired Randall's stores here as well so the layouts are basically the same as they were in the 1980s. Although Randall's had some novel layout ideas in the 1980s with their use of a power alley before most other grocers used that design, the center section and main perishables are in pretty standard locations not unlike the 1980s Safeways. They are very easy stores to shop in, though I'm sure you'd find enough differences from your Safeways to cause some confusion, lol.
I knew Kroger had some stores with weird layouts like that, but I didn't realize any of them were still left! I remember how happy I was (even though I was like 10 at the time) when my local Albertsons dropped the Blue & Grey Market sideways aisle setup.
DeleteI've never visited an HEB, but that sounds pretty terrible! I know some Grocery Palace stores had similar criticisms when they were new, but all the ones I've visited must have been toned down at some point.
If I can handle the bizarre layout of my local Safeway, I can probably handle anything these days! The new store at the top of Queen Anne just opened, and while it's far from the standard Safeway layout I'm used to, it definitely makes a lot more sense than the Lower Queen Anne store, or the U District one that opened last year.