And from this angle, the teetering pile of produce boxes blocks part of it again! Another oddity about this produce department is how blank the walls are on either side of the main department sign, apart from the temporary "discover local" posters -- one of my favorite things about Urban Mix is that it normally doesn't have lots of blank wall space. And I guess it wouldn't be a Kroger without an obvious maintenance issue somewhere in the store -- hopefully those berries are still fresh despite whatever's going on with their case!
Although there are a lot of blank spots on the walls here, it does not look as bad as Artisan and Fresh for Everyone's blank spots at least in the sense that the color of the blank walls hides the blank areas better than the white paint in the newer decor packages. Also, at least at this store, the spotlighting focuses the attention away from the blank spaces and onto the actual decor. Some Artisan stores try this, but it just doesn't work when there is a sea of white.
ReplyDeleteHa, those leak prevention bags, or whatever those are, are all over the place in Houston Krogers, especially under the frozen food cases. Something like that would hardly be out of place here.
I was at my local Grocery Palace Krogertsons, the one which got Artisan and mostly new fake wood flooring in the summer of 2024, and the fake wood flooring is already coming apart pretty rapidly. There are quite a few spots where the store has roped off parts of the floor because of missing vinyl planks and such. Typical Kroger, even when they try to do the right thing by putting in actual floor covering, they manage to screw it up by being cheap. Meanwhile, the flooring tiles which remain from the original Albertsons Grocery Palace floor, mainly in the wine & beer department, still look solid even though they are 26 years old now!
Yeah, it could always be worse. I think the lighting here (with spotlights on the actual decor) helps too. It's too bad that FFE still has blank white walls -- the renderings of it that I saw seemed to show it having the walls mostly covered, but I guess Kroger cheaped out even further.
DeleteWhen Safeway did their Modern remodel wave in the early 2020s, they had similar issues with the new white vinyl they installed (in place of the Lifestyle beige flooring) immediately falling apart. They eventually redid the flooring again, but I'm not entirely sure how it's holding up in the long term since none of the stores I shop at regularly are the ones where I noticed the problems in the past. I guess these chains just can't stop cutting corners whenever they can...