As you may recall, I am now cooking Saturday night dinners. Today's dinner was scheduled to be Chicken Marsala and this required a trip to the grocery store. While we typically frequent Raleys or BelAir we decided to go to Safeway instead. They had built a new one close to our house and we thought we would try it out.
I like Safeway. I have been going to Safeway since the sixties. We currently buy products from them online and have them deliver it to our door. Well, they actually bring it in to the kitchen and will place it in the refrigerator i we ask them to. This is the first time that I have been to one of their newly designed stores.
To me, the most important part of buying products from a grocery store is the ease at which I can find the products that I am looking for. In this new Safeway they have the idiotic notion that the aisles can have little three foot square shelves located to one side of the aisle. There are usually three or four of these spread the length of the aisle. The aisles are only wide enough for two carts to pass each other with about one foot of clearance. These mini shelving units cause bottle necks in the aisles. Naturally, customers tend to stop parallel to these units causing a complete blockage of the aisle!
Another odd thing is that it seems rather dark in the store. Now I realize that most of the light in a grocery store is overkill, but the norm is to have the stores so brightly lit that they seem like sterile doctors offices. This store had one row of double fluorescent lights per aisle and the produce section was comprised of spot lights shining down on the various produce. Not bad, but very odd.
On the plus side they had a Starbucks Coffee, Jamba Juice, and a fairly decent olive bar.
Sadly, the inability to get it, grab what I need, and get out is bad enough that we will not be going back into the store. We will just order what we want from them online.