Another year has passed without me doing any sort of special set for any of the fall/winter holidays (halloween or christmas), so I guess I'd better do something for New Year's at least. The theme this time: New year, new store! This store opened on November 9th, so just under 2 months ago, as a replacement for an earlier store on the same site that we'll be looking at in the weekend posting slot. It was a many-year process to get here, with the design process being delayed by years by the wealthy people of Queen Anne who just couldn't imagine apartments being built in their neighborhood (I'm not sure how much of it was a NIMBY thing and how much was a fear of having to live near people who aren't quite as wealthy -- yeah, I'm not exactly proud to be a Queen Anne resident); the old store closed in May 2022, with construction on its replacement taking just over two years. Everyone seems to love the new store, except for its pricing -- seems like people who haven't shopped at Safeway since 2022 are getting sticker shock from them going from one of the cheapest options to having similar pricing to the other, much higher end, chains in the neighborhood.
Happy New Year! I'm not sure why there was so much discussion about brick colors here only for the Safeway to end up with a much nicer brick color than the rest of the building, lol. Well, I suppose that's subjective, but I'm thinking the dark-colored brick will age much better than the light colored bricks up top. It's not that I'm opposed to light-colored brick, but it has to be cleaned. It is probably a good idea for Safeway to use a more maintenance free color given some of their maintenance habits, lol.
ReplyDeleteI've probably mentioned this before, but I think Randall's pricing now is about as competitive as it has ever been in the Safeway-Albertsons era of Randall's at least! Regular prices are still high, compared to HEB and Kroger, but Randall's does have some nice sales. I also noticed they advertised some Thanksgiving/Christmas staples that Kroger and others didn't even advertise this year.
I don't particularly like brick at all, but I kind of like the light brick. The traditional brick on the Safeway part is kind of nice too since it's reminiscent of Safeway's 90s/early 00s stores, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't what the architects or neighbors were going for!
DeleteGrocery pricing in the Seattle area is just weird right now. Safeway and Fred Meyer used to be cheaper than pretty much anyone else, but these days, everyone seems to have the same prices (except Walmart, which is cheap but only has a few stores). There are some items where Metropolitan Market, the Whole Foods of Seattle, is actually cheaper than Safeway these days! Safeway doesn't have bad prices overall, but they have a bad perception since they've raised prices faster than any other chain to essentially catch up with the likes of QFC and the true high-end chains.