No more excuses--since this blog's relaunch I admit I've been a bit lethargic. I didn't even break that the distribution center and the offices for the Houston Division would be closing, which is disappointing but had to be done (the Dallas division is a bit far off for those Louisiana stores, though) although it does keep the Houston stores. While I'm afraid that this blog will go silent again, I encourage everyone to visit my other endeavor, Carbon-izer.com and The World of Albertsons.
Sunday, March 26, 2017
Sunday, February 26, 2017
[FROM THE ARCHIVES] Albertsons and Cinnabon
Rather than a store post today, let's take a look at one of the few food partnerships Albertsons did before the ubiquitous Starbucks. This article from Supermarket News, titled "Albertson's unit opens its doors to in-store Cinnabon" appeared in the August 26, 1996 issue.
The article doesn't say which store it was, and since Albertsons pulled out of Austin a decade ago, this store has definitely closed. Still, it does look at one of the ways Albertsons was doing in the 1990s. I presume the Cinnabon rolls were the same as ones offered at many (all?) Schlotzsky's shops these days, shipped in frozen. I know Albertsons had a Krispy Kreme program as well in the early 2000s but it wasn't done in-house, they were simply sold from nearby Krispy Kreme restaurants, which sounds like cheating at best.
AUSTIN, Texas - The first Albertson's to house Cinnabon retail outlet coincided with the opening of a 65,000-square-foot food and drug store here at the end of last month.
Dubbed "The Village Market," the new Albertson's is the first chain unit to lease space within the store to other businesses, according to a statement.
Located in the front of the store near the entrance, according to Cinnabon spokeswoman Sharon Roberts, the facility offers its trademark cinnamon rolls, as well as coffee, orange juice, lemonade and an iced chocolate mocha drink called Mochalatta Chill.
Only time will tell how Cinnabon's arrival will affect Albertson's in-store bakery, said a spokeswoman at the store's Boise, Idaho, headquarters.
"It's a very good question, and right now Albertson's is searching for answers since it's a new experiment, and it's only been a few weeks in operation," she said. "We are looking at this closely."
A Cinnabon development executive said it is currently looking at several other Albertson's sites.
"We're definitely nurturing the relationship with Albertson's, but nothing has been confirmed yet," the executive said. "It could be that we'll be in more Albertson's stores in Texas or in other places. We just wanted to open [the Austin store] and see how it goes, and so far it's just been terrific."
The article doesn't say which store it was, and since Albertsons pulled out of Austin a decade ago, this store has definitely closed. Still, it does look at one of the ways Albertsons was doing in the 1990s. I presume the Cinnabon rolls were the same as ones offered at many (all?) Schlotzsky's shops these days, shipped in frozen. I know Albertsons had a Krispy Kreme program as well in the early 2000s but it wasn't done in-house, they were simply sold from nearby Krispy Kreme restaurants, which sounds like cheating at best.
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Randalls #1066 - Houston, TX
A Randalls today won't bring tears to eyes like seeing the deterioration of Sears stores (at least mine, the Willowbrook Sears actually looks decent), but was once supposed to be the best isn't going to impress many people these days.
Opened in late 1996 as a 60,000 square feet store, this store put the screws to a tiny Lewis & Coker (the last store in the chain, it once operated the Kmart Foods stores from College Station to Galveston) less than a mile east and was equipped to be a Randalls Flagship store. Sadly, while the Randalls remains popular and busy today, no "Flagship" features remain of this store. Flagship stores from what I heard all had an upper level added (we'll talk about that more when I cover the Bellaire store) to house a restaurant. I don't know if Randalls here has an upper level, if it did, it's definitely inaccessible (the shopping center itself does, I would be surprised if the store here didn't). Despite a Walgreens right next to it, the Randalls does has a pharmacy. It has also been upgraded to the Lifestyle layout, though some remnants remain of its past. By the time it opened in 1996, Randalls' financial situation was in need of help, their net store count (openings to closings ratio) had flatlined, and Kroger's new Signature stores were starting to dig into the market share.
Originally, the floor featured some sort of brick-like tile around the perishables, which Safeway later covered with their tile. I'm pretty sure that the store only remodeled once or twice (the latter being Lifestyle, of course), despite its age. These pictures were taken just soon before the chain's 20th anniversary (taken in January/February 2016).
The bakery has a refrigerated case, which allowed to carry things like bread pudding, and even though it wasn't great (I can't expect world-class stuff here), it was nice because most supermarkets I've been to don't carry bread pudding, and Safeway (Randalls) does. Can you match that, H-E-B and Kroger?
Despite being right off the highway, access is quite rough. The location is near the CityCentre development, which was built on the site of Town & Country Mall. If you're not accessing it from Memorial Drive proper, have fun getting to it from the Sam Houston Tollway or Katy Freeway.
From the north, you'll have to exit more than a mile and a half up, go through two stoplights before turning left at a third, then going straight through a fourth (and before the Katy Freeway rebuild in the late 2000s, that would be "go through FOUR stoplights before turning left at a fifth").
From the south, you'll have to go through two stoplights after exiting before turning right at a third if you don't want to exit and then fight several lanes over (any time of the day) to turn right.
From the west, that's two miles on the highway frontage roads and five stoplights, and from the east, ALSO five stoplights. So much for highway access, right? With Memorial City Mall accessible from one exit from all four directions, it's no wonder why Memorial City Mall is successful and Town & Country Mall died off.
But since Town & Country Village actually was successful even when the mall was not (in fact it came back to life right around the time the mall was starting to die), that's all right, and since it did NOT die when Safeway began to destroy the chain, though doubtless it harmed its volume.
What can I say for T&C's Randalls now? It's a nice Randalls, but not a terribly distinct one. It has a sushi bar, it has a pharmacy (despite Walgreens next door), it has everything else you'd expect from a store that was under Safeway's control.
I've been trying to find information on Randalls Town & Country opening through the Houston Chronicle archives but I've come up short. I'm not even sure if I can say what they were doing at three Randalls stores were doing as of early 1996, making real homemade water-boiled bagels (the bagels nowadays are just shipped in frozen and baked), so I'm not exactly sure what the amenities what this store were like when it opened twenty years ago.
The Lewis & Coker to the east of the store was sold to Rice Epicurean, which operated it until 2013 when it was sold to The Fresh Market (which closed down within 3 years).
While The Fresh Market is no more, the Randalls has two major competitors in the area, the small Kroger of the Villages, which I hope to repair the page with new information soon, and also the massive H-E-B Bunker Hill, a 100,000+ square foot H-E-B with high volume and an in-store restaurant. Of course, being H-E-B, it misses a lot of the things and just feels like the same relatively bare-bones H-E-B in a nicer coat (I would like to cover that H-E-B at a later time). With some remodels rumored in the Randalls division, it would be nice to see the Randalls Flagship restored to its former position with some unique décor and different options (let's start with actually cooking dishes again). Randalls' long-time California counterpart, Pavilions, recently had a store with one-of-a-kind decor and new options, and it looks terrific. I would like to see Randalls to experiment further with larger and more stores, and generally restore itself from the damage caused by Safeway, but that's unlikely. Remember, if Albertsons didn't come along, then this would've closed by the end of 2014, certainly.
Sunday, January 29, 2017
Market Street #556 - Plano, TX
I'm still trying to get back into this whole Albertsons blogging thing (the two year anniversary of the merger is coming up and not much has happened, sadly) so we'll be switching gears. Maybe I should get into the habit of it being on not just AFB's off weeks but weeks where the recycling goes out the next day.
Our first United Supermarkets store on this blog (Albertsons Florida Blog has it so easy, all they do is cover old Albertsons, the Albertsons-turned-Safeway stores, and Save and Pack, while we cover Randalls/Tom Thumb, Safeway, Albertsons, AND United), this store is part of the United Division out of Lubbock and despite some streamlining, is still blissfully largely free from the mediocrity that plagues Albertsons and Safeway, it is not independent from it. On one hand, it frees up space that might've been slower-moving product but on the flipside loses competitive advantage and distinctiveness.
Sadly, no Market Street stores appear to have been built post-Safeway acquisition (at least the DFW area anyway), and they seem more focused on building the Tom Thumb name with a few urban stores ranging from "modest but not very large" to "very small" (former Fresh Market stores), though it does fit Tom Thumb's range anyway.
This really is what Tom Thumb and Randalls are supposed to be like (well, Randalls was moving toward the whole "Wegmans of Texas" thing and I'm confident that in a better timeline, they'd be 100,000+ square feet now). Anyway, I was in town for the State Fair (never been before), and I actually originally wrote most of this (it's been edited to better fit the context for this website) as part of a longer document on what exactly I did there (that document was strictly for my own records and my friends--sorry, it will never be released on the Internet).
After the somewhat haphazard Dallas roads (like Houston's roads, they tend to have the "never seen a concerted effort in repaving the road in a few decades" appearance), I finally reached the Market Street supermarket. I was intrigued by it as it was owned by United Supermarkets, which was owned by Albertsons, which between its ownership of stores was hit or miss (to put it lightly), and Market Street was definitely a hit.
It was clearly related to Albertsons and Randalls, but more like their better, more educated cousin. It was well staffed even for a Saturday evening (a common complaint for ALB/SWY stores is a lack of staffing). It didn't feel like a terribly large store, though it was really was one of the larger stores in the chain at 70,000 leasable square feet. I was happy to see that it was different enough from its contemporaries to make it worth visiting. I passed by two Tom Thumbs to see it, which was refreshing as in at least that part of Dallas, Tom Thumb had a far better hold on Dallas than Randalls does in Houston.
What it was not was particularly well-visible. Originally, it was a Wal-Mart with a Chick-fil-a and later a Black Eyed Pea in front of the store, but in 2006 it closed, replaced by an "upscale" Wal-Mart Supercenter prototype. By 2007, it was demolished, and by 2008, Market Street and new stores in the parking lot were under construction. The smaller footprint of Market Street puts it farther back than the old Wal-Mart it replaced. I measured in Google Earth...from the outermost southbound lane of Preston Road to the front entrance of the store, it's almost a quarter mile, though part of this is due to right of way in case they want to build an overpass over West Park Boulevard.
Like most modern grocery stores, the perishables are clustered to one side of the store, and even though it was a Saturday evening, the sushi bar and the bakery both had samples, and the wine department too. I'm sorry I don't have any pictures of this part, because I wanted to see it in real life (plus not attract attention).
I grabbed a cart and perused the aisles. For one thing, it downplays the now-common Signature brand, which was a rebranded version of Safeway brand foods (which Albertsons officially rolled out with great fanfare earlier this year). The entire soda department didn't have a store brand in sight, and I was able to pass an entire aisle of soft drinks and others before I finally saw some Signature-branded cranberry grape juice. The other big difference that separated this store from the "mainstream" stores was that the HBA section was huge. It didn't have much in the way of general merchandise, but it had a large supply of hair colorings and even things like beard trimmers and hair dryers.
Unfortunately, I had found out through RetailWatchers that they had recently gone through and excised a lot of the more upscale center-store items that skewed toward the Whole Foods style product mix, but it still felt good like a grocery store was supposed to be, much like a nicer H-E-B sans the warehouse atmosphere and general chaos.
The store also featured the Market Street "Dish" department which was supposed to stock gifts and dinnerware but instead had a strange assortment of Christmas stuff, all of which gave off a weird smell (like how Hobby Lobby smells).
I ended up buying an expensive bottle of cucumber and mint infused water, something that I would normally never buy, but ended up doing so since I was both thirsty and wanted some vegetables (again, I had gone to the state fair, there was nothing I ate that wasn't mostly saturated fat and/or sugar).
So that was Market Street...a refreshing look into one of Albertsons/Safeway's finest banners. The two year anniversary of their merger is coming up tomorrow, and what has happened is a disappointment so far (though not a disaster, by any means!)
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Former Albertsons #2773 - Pearland, TX
A large part of WHY I never ended up posting again was some computer-related issues and some burnout issues, but I'm back, and I'm trying to get stuff in my backlog sent out. The other very large part of why this blog did not become what I wanted it to become is my goal was to get a job in a different city than the one I grew up and went to school in, and that never happened, leading to a mish-mash of whatever I could get. I probably said something like this before, but yes, that is why this blog never worked the way I wanted. I really should post the other stores soon.
Like 2773, this store suffered from a bad location but at first glance, it was supposed to be in a very good location. Exciting things were happening in Pearland, Texas in the early 2000s as a wave of new development was building west of "Old Pearland" closer to 288. There was a Home Depot, a new Kroger, a huge new shopping center, and all manner of new homes. Albertsons must have thought it picked up a pretty sweet spot at Reid and Broadway to build a store and ride the wave of the future in an expanding suburb. After all a Kroger was to the west, and in addition to being the closest supermarket to Old Pearland, it should be better in the future, right? After all, Reid was going to expand north and maybe even connect with the Beltway (presumably to South Wayside Drive, which still is far from connecting to the rest of the 'hood). Wrong. Today, the center with Food Town seems to be in the middle of nowhere with an overdeveloped shopping center on a stub road to the north and to the south, a side road with some of the same rural homes on it that were there since the 1960s.
Pleasantly, the store still retains much of what other sites call "Blue & Green Awnings". It was one of the first store decor packages to use warehouse ceilings. The pharmacy is in the front part of the store, on the far left if you were looking at it from the front. You can see that there was once a much larger collection of health & beauty aids (at least I think that sign's from Albertsons, although the image got cut off), and that has been dramatically downscaled (unfortunately, this seems to have happened in "real" Albertsons stores as well). You can also see they kept the circular check-out stands, too.
Other than that, I got nothing. It was one of four Albertsons Houston stores sold to Grocers Supply Co., which leased them to Food Town. Once again, my camera kind of screws up lighting and contrast making the ceiling look really dark. Don't worry, I'll be upgrading my iPhone soon...
With that said, the question remains--will I get back to posting semi-regularly? Hopefully! Today happens to be the day that it's AFB's off week (which was my intention), and contrary to popular belief, I do have some partially finished posts that I am eager to show off. I'll try to get it at the Sunday two weeks from now.
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