Randalls in Midtown renovates, has the FL Safeway decor

[pseudo3d]

Randalls in Midtown Houston (their urban location opened in 2002, possibly with a Lifestyle upgrade later) has renovated, and it has the same decor as the Florida Safeway stores do. The signage also is like the Florida stores with the aisles named after local nearby streets (Pierce, Main, Louisiana), and like the Florida store also adds a pizza counter. A bright spot for a division that was nearly killed off by Safeway.

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/busines ... o-10781654

[architect]

If anyone is having trouble getting past the paywall, try this link: http://www.chron.com/business/retail/ar ... o-10781643

It is interesting seeing the Florida decor applying in a much more expansive store with so much natural light; it looks really upscale based on the photos. Overall, I'm impressed by this renovation; though the true test will be applying this same strategy to many of the older Safeway-owned stores which are either smaller or lower-end. Clearly, during the latter years of the Lifestyle remodel program, standards slipped to the point that both merchandising and appearance detracted from the shopping experience (with the cardboard department signage stores being the worst offenders).

[storewanderer]

This looks quite a bit better on this store than it did on the Altamonte Springs Store. Also it appears this store has cement floors; Altamonte Springs had a new whiteish-gray floor throughout (looked terrible).

So this begs the question of which division is this interior for. Is this a Houston Division interior only, and applied in FL since those stores were remodeled as a part of Houston?

We see Eastern Division is applying the Star Market colorful interior on its new stores.

[pseudo3d]

This looks quite a bit better on this store than it did on the Altamonte Springs Store. Also it appears this store has cement floors; Altamonte Springs had a new whiteish-gray floor throughout (looked terrible).

So this begs the question of which division is this interior for. Is this a Houston Division interior only, and applied in FL since those stores were remodeled as a part of Houston?

We see Eastern Division is applying the Star Market colorful interior on its new stores.

At some point the stores in Florida were switched over to the Eastern Division, and indications were that originally the Florida stores were to get some variant of the LLC décor, and it may be a continuation of one of those weird things that Albertsons was doing pre-SuperValu where they were playing with multiple decor sets at one time. Note that the Randalls also got the nicer features that the Florida stores got, like pizza, so I imagine we'll continue to see this for the "better" stores.

It looks better probably owing to the fact that the store is far newer, opening 2002 and I believe it did get a Lifestyle renovation as well, compared to the Florida Albertsons stores which are 25+ years old and have had deferred maintenance/capex (none of them were remodeled in the last past 10+ years).