Dear Safeway,
Hello, my name is Anthony and I write and edit for The Frisc. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, anything?
Yeah, yeah, you sell food and stuff, I got that. Your Bay Area locations are near-ubiquitous; you are name-checked in the greatest Van Morrison song; your prices can be higher than those at Whole Foods. You beckon consumers of food and stuff with a logo that looks like the eye of Sauron stricken with glaucoma. You’re planted in acres of asphalt — even in starved-for-housing-space San Francisco — surrounded by buttloads of cars, just like it was during the 1950s except cars these days are butt-ugly in comparison. Walk through the glass doors, and we’re transported to whatever decade it was when the consultants came in.
The retailer’s bright minds seem to have said “Throw tons of stuff at people!” The average store size is 47,600 square feet, and I can attest nary a foot is wasted. This is the first thing shoppers see just across the threshold of a Safeway store in a suburb of San Francisco: angled islands with sodas, cut fruit that’s mostly melon, and other goodies. (My iPhone photo skills aren’t my strong suit, so please bear with me.)
Just behind this obstacle course is a Starbucks, which I’m not sure is what people cruise into a grocery store for anyway, but let’s keep moving and see if we can get oriented.
Before we get to the familiar grid, there are soup tureens, the eponymous salad bar, and prewrapped items. Are you supposed to eat first, and then go through your grocery list, or do both at the same time? Also, I guess you go … to the right, without bumping into Starbucks.
Finally we wander into the aisle-based environment better described as modern-day hell:
If you already feel overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of offerings, that is the point.
All supermarkets have their tricks, spreading bread, milk, eggs, etc. around the store so you spend more time there and buy more of what you didn’t plan on buying. Safeway may be betting the company on these impulse purchases, known as “splurchases.” Why the heck else would they place things right on the floor right in the way of where you’re trying to go, if not to take this creepy nudging to an extreme:
By now I’m about halfway around the store perimeter, where I’m ripest for the coaxing for consumer-packaged crap. Dodging all the things that can be had cheaper at Trader Joe’s or Target (presumably that’s what Safeway is vying to stave off by having more selection, competition from specialty and big-box merchants), I get to a separate angled-island archipelago.
The low-carb Atkins fad is still popular, but you wouldn’t know that here. Starches and sugars in nearly every baked permutation abound, and maybe the idea is that this is impressive. Here’s what else struck me: It’s a sea of clamshells! Just like entrepreneurs got rich selling picks and shovels to punters seeking California’s gold, the plastics industry today wins no matter what. Even the bags with fresh bread have a clear film on them, so you are not baited and switched by words such as “baguette.” Here’s a declaration that’s never been heard after getting home from Safeway: “Surprise! You didn’t notice I was actually a batard, fool. Ha-ha!”
Leaving potential diabetes behind, we come to a … special room. This might be the work of the same whizzes who wanted to “rebrand” Safeway with a $100 million ad campaign many moons ago.
Maybe they thought the high-end, discerning Safeway customer would appreciate the pricier wines especially because they’d be partitioned off. (There is something like 10 times as much wine stocked in the open aisles, and it probably cycles through a lot faster.) Maybe they thought shoppers would stop and say, “You know what, I am that high-end customer. I will study the curated labels in the special room, which is climate-controlled so my Creamsicles won’t melt.”
It’s worthy to note the comment of one analyst to Advertising Age on the 2005 rebranding, because $100 million and 12 years later it still applies: Safeway is “just another grocery-store chain. That’s the fallacy behind what they are doing and most consumers are pretty savvy beyond that point and might see the [new ads], but then go to the store and see it’s the same old crummy Safeway.”
Nearing the end of the circle: There is, er, a healthy appetite for mushy textures like potato salad. (I admit ham pasta salad, which I didn’t try, is a unique preparation, and yes, the overall assortment is colorful.) But speaking of baby food, after scanning a storeful of high-contrast labels, the rounded Comic Sans-y font for the prices stands out here.
This particular typeface could be one of those things that won over the focus groups, yet does it not look infantile and also stupefying? Is this what being on-brand at Safeway means, no sharp serifs on the numbers you see 6 million times while shopping? I can’t think of a more appropriate encapsulation for the evident confusion of a store concept that has been around for more than a century. (To dork out further, here’s an article on the typographic monotony of American retail.)
Thank goodness we are close to the front doors and the way out, past the branded cold-cut cooler, the $6 bags of chips, and other sundries. It’s hard not to feel relieved at the sight of the world beyond after a studied walk through a burlesque place, gussied up to stir simple pleasures and stuck being a dated and vapid experience.
The whole notion of getting products into the hands of consumers by making them drive to you: It was cost-saving genius when car culture was ascendant. But supermarkets are being Amazoned, Instacarted, and Postmated into their next phase, yet for all the issues you can have with the app economy, based on one trip to a Safeway, any evolution is happening at an indiscernible pace for the once-iconic brick-and-mortar stores.
The only question then is not whether Safeway will start over, but when.
Follow Anthony Lazarus on Twitter: @Sr_Lazarus