Culture Clash at the New Safeway

Everything about the spankin’ new Safeway on 19th screams upscale mom, shop here: cool architectural features, gourmet items and corresponding wines everywhere, organic meats and vegetables prominently displayed. But that’s not who is there on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Sacramento: it’s hard-livin’ white folks in for their cigarettes and quarts of beer and hard-working brown folks clutching coupons, food stamps, diapers and frozen food. More the crowd snichols remembers from shopping at the dismal Safeway on Capitol Hill in DC…well, and snichols, their target demographic.

So what does this mean for the latest midtown retail innovation? snichols has no earthly idea (so Bill sort of indicates he doesn’t know why snichols is blogging about it and he has a point). Maybe the Land Park moms pass through on their way home from work weekdays. Maybe they will never come. In which case will it stay upscale in its focus or start having different displays?

Personally, snichols is cool with the current configuration–a great supermarket convenient to everyone with stuff for everyone. Good work, Safeway (unlikely kudos to a corporation snichols normally avoids, but hey, they’re union and not Walmart).