Ice chests in the floral department has to be one of the stranger merchandising choices I've seen, but I guess in a store like this you have to take whatever space you can get! In a store like this, it's honestly impressive that there aren't weird product combinations everywhere. I'm impressed that it has a fairly nice floral department too, especially in a store that never got a Lifestyle remodel.
It is interesting to see the greeting cards section in the Floral department. In many ways, that combination makes a lot of sense, but it is something which is rarely seen. I suppose the cards section takes up too much space in most stores and so that would not work with the rather open floral areas, but it works at this store since the selection of cards is small.
ReplyDeleteI'll combine this with a comment about the checkstands from the other post. My local Randall's has one mini-checkstand like this. It is used for the 'Express' checkstand. The other lanes all have normal Safeway checkstands. The store has room for the full-sized one, but it seems they use the mini one because there is a large Coca-Cola cooler in front of of the checkstand.
There are reports that the Houston Midtown Randall's has dumped these mini-checkstands and replaced them with, yep, Albertsons-style turntables! In fact, they might be old surplus Albertsons checkstands. I have not seen them, but someone reliable did report that information after visiting the store recently.
Greeting cards in the floral department are a fairly common sight these days, at least at Safeway. Most of their stores have reduced the card section to be about the size you see here, and a decent number of them have moved them into extra space in the extra-large Lifestyle-era floral departments.
DeleteNow that you say that, these do look like half of the normal double-sided express checkouts. Maybe that's all they are, which makes it even weirder that Safeway didn't do this on a regular basis!
Woah, new (or newly reused) turntable checkouts is something I never thought I would see, at least at a major chain store! That's bizarre. I wonder what they were thinking.