1-2) King City (on 101) and Fresno (on Hwy 99) appear to be the southernmost outposts of Safeway on major highways. It looks like Vons picks up in Bakersfield (99) and Goleta, outside Santa Barbara (101). Interstate 5 is on the dry west side of the San Joaquin Valley, so it doesn't really have much in the way of large towns or accompanying supermarkets; there's a Save Mart in Coalinga just off the highway, and another in Visalia on 99.
Bakersfield has two Vons and three Wal-Marts. 3) Something similar happened up here in the Bay Area about 12 years ago, when a small local chain named Andronico's* went under. Safeway bought up all the Andronico's real estate and outstanding leases, converting the store on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto (across the street from Chez Panisse, in the same block as the Cheese Board, two blocks from the Mother Peet's) into a Safeway in spite of the fact that Safeway owned a newly redeveloped store one block away. Continuing further along Shattuck through the Solano Tunnel to Solano Avenue, there's an Andronico's-turned-Safeway about one mile away (north, roughly) from the original Shattuck Safeway. Then, continuing west along Solano into neighboring Albany, there's a Safeway that was always a Safeway one mile west of the Upper Solano ex-Andronico's Safeway. I find the logic of this multiplicity confusing. And to top it off, one mile north of the Lower Solano Safeway is El Cerrito Plaza, which contains a Lucky's Supermarket - a chain which, like Safeway, is owned by the Albertson's Group. The former Andronico'ses in Berkeley have been rebranded as "Andronico's Community Markets", but the merch is much the same as the alternating Safeways, and the same newspaper sales prices apply. If Kroger and Albertson's merge, then it'll be Buy n Large from coast to coast outside the southeast. *originally based in SF's Inner Sunset district; they'd bought up a few other local chains, including the two stores that the Berkeley Co-op owned outright when they shut down in 1988 - the original store on University Avenue (my home store, where my dad was a board member and the newspaper publisher in the 60s) and the fancy store on Shattuck in the Gourmet Ghetto. The land was worth more than the organization; the 99-year lease for the Telegraph/Ashby store was sold to Whole Foods Peter "the old story was that the frontier was the Tehachapi" Adler *plus ça change, plus c'est la même supermarché *en Berkeley, CA/USA On Tuesday, December 20, 2022 at 4:06:52 PM UTC-8 Jimmy Warren wrote: > When a Mason-Dixon line needs to be established in CA, it'll be called the > Safeway-Vons line. > > Quiz: for any major north-south freeway or highway, what are the two > cities that straddle the Safeway-Vons line? > > Related question: King City: which store do they have? > > Related Cliff Claven Trivia: when I was a kid growing up in Los Angeles > and San Diego suburbs, Vons and Safeway were two different stores. In 1989 > they merged, and all of our Southern California Safeways got renamed Vons. > So many of our suburban shopping centers ended up with two Vons's as > anchors on either end when it used to be Safeway at one end and Vons at the > other. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/0e068dcf-8856-4594-bf64-9b6b7ecafef0n%40googlegroups.com.
