Safeway's Wonderful World of Color

“Color does brighten things up, doesn’t it?” Walt Disney asked the television audience in the opening minutes of his first Color TV broadcast in 1961. Well, it was true for Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color”, and it was also true for Safeway and many other leading supermarket chains throughout the 1950’s and into the early 60’s. Pastel colors were used to great effect in this 1953 Portland, Oregon Safeway, which also features signage the company would use as a standard in its stores for more than a decade. The different colors allowed easy identification of departments and created an illusion of space in an era when most supermarkets still averaged 15,000 square feet or less.

As the sixties wore on, Safeway changed to deeper, darker shades for their standard color scheme. Many others who had used a pastel scheme did the same, or switched to one or more of a much wider variety of wall finishes, including paneling, wallpaper, mosaics, murals – you name it.

...And Don't Forget The Coffee!

Gotta have that flavor lift... Here's another 1945 photo, this one featuring a gentle reminder outside a San Francisco Safeway. Edwards was Safeway's longtime house brand. The billboard looks bigger than the store itself!

Safeway Upgraded

It would be understandable to assume that civic design approval for retail stores is a fairly recent thing – a phenomenon of the past 25 to 30 years only, or perhaps dating as far back as the mid-60’s, when Lady Bird Johnson’s “Keep America Beautiful” campaign ushered in a new, austere (shudder) era of retail architecture.

The interesting fact is that there are examples of appearance zoning that go back much earlier than this, and many of these early results were pretty nice looking. Pictured above are two Safeway stores from 1945. The top photo features the ubiquitous standard Safeway design – cement outer construction, painted white, with the famous yellow and red porcelain-coated signage. Many hundreds of these stores were built throughout the 1930’s and 40’s. The second store is an attractive example of an effort on Safeway’s part to blend in with the local area. The brick and Spanish tile are striking, and the subtle signage (while maintaining Safeway’s trademark typeface) is icing on the cake. In all likelihood, these stores were alike in every other respect. The front glass and door arrangements appear to be identical, right down to the little “Safeway” decal to the left of the doors.

Just a few notes on Safeway at the time these stores were opened – the chain had 2,442 stores in 23 states, Washington D.C., and Canada and were a key factor in the Western, Southwestern, Eastern, and Plains States’ grocery markets. They were by far the dominant grocery retailing concern on their home turf of Northern California.

White Front - Under the Familiar Arch

All right folks, time to grab your BankAmericard, Master Charge or just good old fashioned cash as we take a brief trip to a great discount store of the past. Since we’ve been discussing West Coast supermarket chains lately and I had yet to cover a single actual discount chain at all (save the Lucky variants from the last post), this is a good place to start – with the long gone White Front stores.

In 1959 Interstate Department Stores, Inc., led by president Sol Cantor, purchased the two-store White Front operation in Los Angeles (the next year, Cantor would purchase the ten-store Topps "Discount City" chain in the East). White Front was founded in 1929 and was known for many years as primarily a seller of electrical appliances. Interstate moved quickly to expand White Front’s retail offering to include clothing, sporting goods, automotive items, household décor and much more. By 1963, the chain had grown to 11 stores and by 1970 there were 30 stores, concentrated around the Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle market areas. The new store footprints ballooned to 150,000 square feet, and in many cases a supermarket department was added to the mix.

By far the most distinctive White Front store design featured a massive arched entrance-way with the “White Front” lettering fanned out along the edge. They were spectacular looking stores, and Interstate went all out to make sure their Grand Opening festivities created a stir to match. A look through old newspaper articles on White Front grand openings shows that many stars were typically on hand – Jayne Mansfield, Troy Donahue, Bill Cosby (riding high on his early “I Spy” fame, but long before he became a legend) and Sebastian Cabot (of “Family Affair”) all did their part, along with a horde of lesser-knowns. Ah, the benefits of opening a store in Los Angeles.

In the early 70’s, the chain began a retrenchment to Los Angeles, and within a couple of years was gone. Interstate Stores folded and the only remaining vestige of the company would ultimately be Toys “R” Us.

The first photo is of the original White Front location at 7651 So. Central Avenue in Los Angeles. The store was opened in 1929, but this photo looks to be considerably more recent than that. This store was burned down during the 1965 Watts riots, and was replaced by a modern White Front at the same location which opened in March, 1967. The second and third photos are of an unknown location and are from 1968, showing the classic exterior and an interior view where customers are perusing the latest beautiful avocado and burnt sienna appliances. The final photos are from 1970, a new store at Normandie Avenue and Imperial Highway in Los Angeles. White Front had scrapped the arched look in favor of a more standard design, albeit with a “key-osk” (Sorry.) out front. Note the young ladies in the last photo checking out the groovy “tape decks”.

The Three Faces of Lucky

In 1959, Lucky began to expand upon their basic 20,000 square foot grocery store footprint with the opening of the first “Lucky Discount Center”, a new concept which added a variety of non-food items – clothing, small appliances, outdoor products and more in combination with their regular supermarket departments. Many of the Discount Centers featured liquor and pharmacy departments as well. These stores ranged from roughly 30,000 to 65,000 square feet.

The following year, Lucky purchased the forerunner of their Gemco membership store division. Lucky proceeded to open several more Gemcos through the ensuing years in their California market, eventually expanding in the later 60's and into the 1970's to Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Maryland, Virginia, Texas and the metropolitan Chicago area. In the eastern states and Chicago, the stores were operated under the slightly different name “Memco”. These stores sold the above-mentioned items, along with greatly expanded apparel offerings plus several leased operations – including shoe, jewelry and automotive departments, gas stations and snack bars, a cleaners and an optometry shop. The Gemco and (and later Memco) stores averaged 100 to 110,000 square feet.

These photos show nice examples of each of the three faces of Lucky. They date from 1966, a year in which the chain grew to 166 standard supermarkets, 18 discount centers and 11 Gemco stores.