For those that don't know, this began as a store called "Skaggs Albertsons". One of the more interesting partnerships in supermarket history, Skaggs Drug Centers ran a highly successful group of drug stores. It was only natural that they would team up with a respected (but regional) name to create a chain of large food and drug combos when such a thing was more of a novelty than something expected, and Skaggs Albertsons was born.
The store opened in July 1971 and remained through the years with minimal exterior changes except in the front facade (the side entrance would remain the same, though it was eventually sealed). In the late 1970s, Skaggs and Albertsons split ways, and while Albertsons would rebrand their stores in other markets (San Antonio, Florida, and a few others), Skaggs would keep theirs. A few stores briefly got rebranded to Skaggs SuperCenters, but this store was spared and in November 1979, a full page advertisement in the paper announced that the store would be changing to Skaggs-Alpha Beta, facilitated by buying the Alpha Beta name with purchasing the American Stores grocery chain that same year (it would also change the corporate name to American Stores).
The new "American Stores" company continued to manage this store until it rebranded it as Jewel-Osco in 1991 (giving it a minor renovation in the process). Shortly after, American Stores sold the remaining Jewel-Osco stores in Florida (these were new-builds), Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma to Albertsons, as well as a dry goods distribution center in Oklahoma.
It was soon closed and reopened as an Albertsons, giving it another remodel, the "Blue & Gray Market" as Albertsons Florida Blog calls it. I don't know what the original store number under Albertsons was, as it was opened after 2702 and renumbered as part of the Houston division later in the 1990s.
And so from about 1992 to 1997, Albertsons managed a store on the corner of College and University. However, Randalls, an upscale supermarket further down University, sold its store to Albertsons, causing the small supermarket to quickly be abandoned (it closed in November 1997, according to sources I've heard), and it continued stand for nearly another 15 years, longer than it had been any name. Amazingly, something almost happened that would've prevented that fate.
Albertsons must have had second thoughts about closing down the store, as the store had been popular (24 hours!) despite its obvious age, so in May 2000, they filed plans with the city to re-open the store as Albertsons #2797. This time, the Albertsons would gain a fancy "Albertsons University Market" branding and come complete with a Starbucks and "J.A.'s Kitchen", a deli concept (JA stood for Joe Albertson) that Albertsons played around with for a short while in smaller stores (from what I can tell, it was just the regular deli usually placed in smaller stores or drug sores).
Other shots, taken January 2011...
Regrettably, I couldn't get any of the interior on that shot, or any other time: the windows were painted over, and my one shot of the interiors was kind of messed up by the flash, and while it did capture some of the interior in a blurry configuration that revealed rows of fluorescents and columns, it mostly created a reflection of me, which, of course, I'm not posting.
Most Albertsons stores in Florida were 24 hours from the 70's through the 90's, when many eventually switched to 6am-Midnight. Altamonte Springs was open from 6am-2am as of recently. Near the University of South Florida Campus in Tampa was an Albertsons that was open 24 hours (Store #4321). Apparently, the college students would come in late at night and act so rowdy and sometomes trash the place, that Albertsons had to cut the hours to 6am-10pm (or something like that) for safety and loss prevention purposes. One of the fraternities at USF also had an initiation where you had to run through the Albertsons naked in the middle of the night, so being at this store in the middle of the night could have been a strange experience.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if Albertsons would've cut hours if they stayed open here (remember, the entire company started to have problems as we both well know), but you're probably right, even though other grocery stores do have 24 hour locations (the "Disco Kroger" in Houston, which also was near bars and nightclubs). Most of the bars in this area are on the west side of the Northgate area (Albertsons is in the east), but there's also a dance hall in the same shopping center that gets pretty crowded, and a problematic 24 hour McDonald's (the whole restaurant is 24 hours) where someone nearly got beaten to death that's just in the background of one of those pictures.
DeleteThere's probably a reason the CVS that's been built in the area (at the ground floor of a residential tower) is not open after midnight.
Prior to the 2005 breakup, almost all Albertsons stores were 24 hour operations. They briefly operated a store in Natchitoches, LA, from 1998-2003ish. That store was a 24 hour operation in a small college town of 20,000.
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