It's difficult to find much information on the history of Andronico's, but if this sign is accurate, apparently they've been around since 1929. That makes them somewhat younger than their longtime Bay Area competitor Safeway, but older than their current corporate overlord Albertsons. It's interesting to see all of the reusable ice chests on display here -- disposable styrofoam ice chests used to be a staple of Albertsons frozen departments, but when Washington banned them last year, our local stores didn't really replace them with anything; meanwhile, California surprisingly didn't ban styrofoam until this year (and apparently still isn't really following its own rules), but this store had these instead for some reason. (I didn't know Igloo was still making versions of those classic Playmate ice chests!)
It is nice to see some Igloo coolers here! Igloo is based in the Houston area (though owned by foreign company) and Igloo makes their coolers on the far west side of the Houston area. They used to have a plant across I-10 from the former Town & Country Mall, but both the mall and that Igloo plant are long-gone. There's a Randall's Flagship in the non-mall part of Town & Country though which attracts a lot of yoga pants-clad women driving Bentley and Lamborghini SUVs based on my visits there, lol. I wonder if they sell Igloo products given that foam coolers are very much legal here.
ReplyDeleteAs for the comment about the flooring in the other posts, supermarkets often had colorful checkerboard floors in their frozen foods departments back in the coffin cooler days. The design here is a lot better than those hideous western-style Grocery Palace frozen foods floors which didn't make any sense at all! The ones with actual western colors looked better than the green and peach ones that were more common, unfortunately. Green and peach aren't bad colors, they just didn't work with that design.
I didn't know Igloo still made things in the US! That's pretty rare for cheap (plastic) consumer products like this these days.
Delete