Next up: Sears, on the southwest corner of the mall. I've gone over this before, but as a refresher, this was originally built as Frederick & Nelson in the early days of this mall, before being sold to Sears in the 90s when Frederick & Nelson went out of business. Sears seems to have mostly redesigned the upper part of the building (though it doesn't look much like their standard 90s stores) but left the original flagstone walls on the ground floor.
Hey, the Corvette has no front license plate and the Camry has no rear one! Though maybe there is a temporary paper plate taped from inside the window of that Camry. I don't know.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I noticed pretty quickly after leaving PDX in 2023 was that there were quite a few cars there which had no license plates at all. Usually the cars were rather beat-up looking, even more so than that XV20 Camry. You wouldn't see that here, though we do have our own version, which is abuse of temporary paper license plates. I know Texas is trying to stop that, and it seems the illegal use of paper plates has been reduced, but I'm not sure if the problem has been eliminated entirely. I know Texas wants to get rid of temporary paper plates entirely and replace them with temporary metal plates which are reused by dealerships. They've been talking about that for years though and I still don't see it so I don't know.
This is completely unrelated to anything Southcenter, but have you seen the new Monochrome Lifestyle v2 decor which must be quite new? I was flipping through photos of the San Francisco Marina Safeway which still has the very old neon Safeway sign outside and I was greeted with some April 2025 photos with Monochrome Lifestyle v2. Well, I guess Lifestyle v2 is really living on now. First there was Colorful Lifestyle v2 and now Monochrome Lifestyle v2! Personally, I prefer original Lifestyle v2 and Colorful Lifestyle v2, but if Monochrome Lifestyle v2 keeps Lifestyle v2 around for years to come and if it keeps cheap Modern remodels away, I won't complain, lol.
Look for the April and May 2025 photos here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/eJqmhUpmQnwj9UPG9
I'm pretty sure that is an old-style temporary plate inside the back window. Those hand-written ones were heavily abused around here (I know I saw several where the expiration date had clearly been re-written), so in 2023-ish (I know it was sometime after my parents bought their new car) the state changed to pre-printed plastic ones that I guess were supposed to be less easy to change.
DeleteAs for the Corvette, who knows. Washington does require front and back license plates, but it's not heavily enforced, and that car could be from out of state or have temporary plates itself (the paper ones were only ever installed in the back... not sure about the new plastic ones).
I've seen "Colorless Lifestyle v1" before (on the SoCal Supermarket Blogger's Flickr page), but not the v2 version! Normally, it seems to have shown up in stores that they were planning on replacing or closing... hopefully that's not the case there. That store's a real oddball -- in addition to the classic neon sign, it's technically older than the first Marina store, because the Marina portion was added on to an existing Safeway!
According to a recent article in San Francisco, Safeway is planning on reworking the classic neon sign such that it uses LEDs instead of real neon. It seems it is the last real neon sign in all of San Francisco! I can't say I'm too shocked about Safeway wanting to switch it over to LEDs as I'm sure the neon is expensive to run and maintain. Plus, it is San Francisco, so they're probably under some pressure to achieve energy efficiency. Anyway, I don't think Safeway would go through the trouble of re-doing the sign's lighting if they were planning on replacing the store. I hope not at least!
DeleteLink: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bay-area-vacation-wonderland-changes-20300460.php
Sorry, that is the wrong link! This is the right one: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/market-street-safeway-hides-stubborn-sf-mystery-20242869.php
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