Tag: Alpha Beta

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030705-greenfrog

It doesn’t get much better than this one, does it? It’s from my just completed whirlwind weekend supermarket tour of Bakersfield, finally shooting some of the stores I’d added to my database several months ago. I’ll post the photos later in a ne section which will compete the Central Valley Trilogy, but I figured I’d better hit the town this weekend, since I’ll be leaving the west coast for good in a few months.

030705-ralphs

As luck would have it, I was also in town for the last weekend of Ralphs in Bakersfield. Save-Mart is taking over two of the three stores, adding yet another chain to the collection of prototypes it has in its collection of stores.

030705-alphabeta

Like I said, there will be more pictures later, but I had to include this ghost of Alpha Beta I spotted on Brundage Lane. Actually, the Rite-Aid is a ghost now too…

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022705-pav

Anyone want to hazard a guess as to whether or not this Pavilions unit in Seal Beach might have originally been a Safeway-Super S combo? It has a matching Sav-on drug store next door and the whole thing really looks like it was originally meant as one integrated building. Either way, I’m pretty sure the Pavilions was originally a Safeway store.

022705-abs

Via a link in the message board, I found yet another useful searchable image archive, this one from Seattle. The cool Albertsons photo above came from it.

022705-gu

Also found a set of really nice images from a 1952 Grand Union in Patterson NJ at some Library of Congress site for which I’ve misplaced the URL.

For those of you who are address and date nuts, you may be excited to see that I added this list of all 1973 locations to the Alpha Beta section today. It’s interesting stuff and I did a little limited cross-checking o see how many stores in Southern California were still operating as Ralphs locations, and how many in Northern California had lasted long enough to become Albertsons branches.