The bakery looks much more Safeway-like, despite the lack of wall tile, thanks to all of the Lifestyle fixtures. Even the cake case looks like it might have been replaced with a Safeway-spec one. Of course, even Albertsons stores that remain under their own brand often have Lifestyle bakery fixtures these days -- it seems that Albertsons has standardized that chain-wide.
It is really hard to tell with Safertsons. Some of them feel just like old Albertsons, but some are more Safeway-ized. I suppose it depends on when the store was converted. Ones that were converted in the heart of the Lifestyle era are probably going to feel more Safeway-like than more recent conversions.
ReplyDeleteThe local Randalbertsons are a good example of this. The local Grocery Palace Randalbertsons I shop at sometimes really doesn't feel Albertsons or Safeway-like, not entirely. Safeway did a lot of work to that location during the Lifestyle era, but given the oddities of the Grocery Palace layout, they couldn't entirely take the Albertsons-ness out of it so it just feels like something uniquely different. That differs from my local Krogertsons which still very much feels Albertsons-like, even more than Grocery Palace stores which are still Albertsons!
OTOH, when I went to the Cully Neighborhood Albertsons in Portland in 2023, it still very much feels entirely Albertsons even though it has Lifestyle v3 now. Now, granted, it is an Albertsons still, but the Lifestyle conversion was done on the cheap and it hardly removed any Albertsons-ness from the place. The Troutdale Grocery Palace Safertsons still feels Albertsons-like as well even with Lifestyle v3, but it does have that stripped out feeling that modern Grocery Palaces have. Granted, that was done when the store was still an Albertsons as Albertsons somewhere along the way decided to try to make Grocery Palace stores feel not so Grocery Palace like.
I don't believe we have any Alberways around here that were converted before the merger. At the time Albertsons was dumping a lot of stores around here (the early 2010s), Safeway didn't seem interested in (or maybe couldn't afford) taking them over. So the "early" conversions around here date from the early days of the merger, and those (like this one) generally involved a fairly limited remodel that still left the stores feeling like Albertsons. The later conversions have included a more thorough remodel that takes away much of the obvious Albertsons feel, but doesn't exactly make them feel like Safeways either (similar to their new-build stores).
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