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And what happened to the Wells Fargo stagecoach commercial where they deliver a Christmas tree? That is one of my favorite commercials ever. For a while Wells Fargo dropped the old west motif in their commercials but still ran the Christmas tree commercial. Now that WFB has expanded pretty much nat...

On the radio during this Christmas season I have been hearing Safeway's jingle that says "Are you having any fun?". First of all, who sings that? It sounds old like it could be Andy Williams. It's Tony Bennett... I picked up on his Brooklyn accent right away. It's actually a little snippe...

Wayne Winterland Jr mentions that Bazaar Foods took over from Allied in charge of Kmart Foods. I looked through the Stockton Record Microfilm from 1971 and there was an ad for Kmart Foods here in Stockton California and it mentions that "Kmart Quality Discount Foods is now under BAZA'R MANAGEM...

As an aside to all this, when I was looking through some late '60s issues of Safeway News a few weeks ago, I read a couple of stories that mentioned how hard the chain was hit in the 1968 Washington, D.C. riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King. I don't believe any of the stores was ...

I figure most malls lease their anchor buildings to their tenants, even if the store designs are specific to that chain. If the mall goes down, so do all the stores. Actually, most anchor stores own their own buildings. If you use a county assessor's office GIS tool online to look at a mall site, y...

Here's another mansard-roofed standalone store from Port Townsend (442 W. Sims Way): http://www.co.jefferson.wa.us/photo/001 ... hoto01.jpg. It's had a full remodel and doesn't look anything like this now, however.

Former Safeway in Aberdeen, WA. http://www.pacificcohistory.org/sw2005_1.htm http://www.pacificcohistory.org/sw2005_1_28.jpg This building looks nearly identical to an ex-Safeway built in 1971 at 8400 Steilacoom Blvd. S.W. in the Oakbrook neighborhood of Lakewood, south of Tacoma. The Oakbrook Safe...

On the other hand, the Marketplace name in the Seattle area is used on traditional supermarkets that Fred Meyer acquired from other retailers. They're not older stores like the Marketplaces in Portland. Unless they're planning on dropping the Marketplace name from these stores, which would introduce...

That is probably one of the shortest-lived units in the chain: 16 years from opening to demolition. Thanks for noticing in the caption that it opened in 1950 -- I didn't see that. I had called it a 1940s store just on looks, but now that I've viewed the pictures again knowing it was built in 1950, ...

Don't forget their budget label, Scotch Buy..which has been reborn as "Simply Red" Apparently Scotch Buy wasn't around in 1968, since that was the whole list as published. And the new budget label is Basic Red -- I think a certain British music group would have legal issues with a Simply ...

Here's a definitive list of all of Safeway's private labels and their product categories, as published in the October 1968 issue of Safeway News -- I'm sure it will flog everyone's memory banks. Dairy Products : Lucerne, Party Pride Eggs : Lucerne, Cream o' the Crop Coffee : Safeway, Edwards Canned ...

From the October 1966 issue of Safeway News , here's a photo essay detailing the replacement of a classic 1940s store with a Marina. The new store, #422, is still in service -- more than twice as many years as the predecessor building. In the Northwest Safeways thread, someone linked to a couple of ...

I believe that Thrifty Drugs was a name used by many Rexall-affiliated independent drugstores in the Puget Sound area during the '50s and '60s. It's my impression that these stores had no connection with the actual Thrifty chain based in California that later merged with PayLess -- correct me if I'm...

The old Pay Less (at Chestnut/P) was previously a "Value Giant" store. Value Giant was a chain of discount stores formerly owned by Castle & Cooke (parent company of Dole fruit) that PayLess bought out. By the time this happened in the early '80s, the separate California and Oregon ba...

Former Safeway, Lakewood, WA. Looks like a possible false-front. http://www.fwp-inc.com/search/individualLease.php?CBA=43922 This is a false front, but it's not hiding anything interesting. You'll notice on that page that this store was constructed in 1984. This is at the Lakewood Towne Center (for...