Gary The Gull's Blog

Our Menlo Park Safeway has an identity crisis and a strange history. It started out as a reasonably-sized store that happened to span the great socioeconomic rifts of its surrounding neighborhoods. It wasn’t the nicest store around, but it brought a diverse crowd to the heart of Menlo Park by offering accessibility and family-priced groceries. Unfortunately it broke. One day—almost overnight—Safeway punctured a wall and leaked into the recently-evacuated bowels of the adjacent Rite-Aid. Suddenly their inventory was smeared across 150 meters of aisle-baffled wasteland. As patronage declined, Safeway underwent a series of incrementally crappier remodels in an attempt to maximize usage of their new real estate.

To perform some confusing and unnecessary operation on the ceiling, Safeway installed overhead scaffolding that created a troglodytic atmosphere. While we were all hunched over our shopping carts, trying to avoid a plank decking or a halogen burn, management aggressively rearranged inventory. I would head towards the popcorn and find it replaced by diapers and feminine hygiene products. I would head towards bread and find diapers and feminine hygiene products. I would head towards diapers and feminine hygiene products, where I would find cat food—and diapers and feminine hygiene products. Christopher Alexander would have had a horrific fit had he happened by at this hour hunting for hemorrhoid pads or such.

The remodeling continued in this manner for several years before they finally just gave up and tore the Safeway down.

A short while later, and a few paces to the right, a much larger Safeway sprung up. Covering more than 6,000 square meters, this store defines its own microclimate. Despite its mammoth size, Safeway’s inventory continues to suck. They have a Starbucks, a Jamba Juice, a sushi bar, and a nut bar but they allocated space for exactly 5 boxes of 100W light bulbs. If you swing by Safeway after about 8PM, you will not find any 100W light bulbs remaining, so you’ll have to return home to eat your sushi, latte, Jamba Juice, and sugared nuts in darkness or in the gloomy glow of the 20W decorative bulb you bought out of desperation.

Our braindead phoenix of a Safeway has tried to scale to an “up” for which it’s not prepared. Besides the sushi and nut bars (nut bars have nothing to do with tea-bagging, by the way), this store offers multimedia shopping cart rentals that look like cars and play edutaining videos to your children while you scald a fellow shopper with your latte so you can grab the last box of 100W light bulbs. These amenities are…interesting…but not conducive to efficient shopping. Safeway’s stab at the Whole Foods/Draeger’s/Andronico’s clientele seems to have missed its target and wound up in its own leg. Take, for instance, the all-natural, goat-derived ZUM BAR® soap. Whole Foods has a similar high-end, cut-it-yourself soap station, but they first mastered the art of containing the smell that such a product emits. Safeway’s ZUM BAR® station smells like someone discovered a lavender flower with an anus and poured lye into it. The militarized soap aerosol forms an alkali stench cloud that repels anyone with standard faculties. Unfortunately for Safeway, it also makes wrong-minded people hungry. This results in amusing afterthought signage that I’ve painstakingly photographed through a respirator after applying six jars of Vaseline to avoid chemical burns.

If you did not LOL at that sign, please read it again while keeping in mind that ZUM BAR® looks like this:

While you’re holding your sides and gasping for breath, please consider Dean Kamen’s hideous Segway for a moment.

I love signs. They offer a concise peek into the psyche of people tasked with conveying information they neither necessarily want nor are equipped to convey. I think signs are an accidental art medium—the artists: usually bureaucrats or blue-collar workers whose casual omissions or misplaced emphases can speak more to our zeitgeist than an entire decade of intentional expression. Stupid signs are also fun to giggle at because they’re fucking stupid. For example, a simple “inclement” or the more typographically-friendly “wet” might have given the following some climatic context—rescuing this field from abandonment due to deferred sign retrieval.

Some signs are so cerebral that they’re obtuse. Thankfully, this one included a reassuring “proceed ahead”, which most people correctly interpreted as “ignore this sign and keep driving.”

Others imply strange things like a unisex restroom season. Interestingly, the “i” in this sign appears to have been hurriedly inserted.

And speaking of insertion, did you know you should first remove all attachments?

And speaking of children, it turns out they’re quite handy to have around for mountain lion encounters.

It is okay to run from a mountain lion once you’ve fed it; however, iconography is a completely different subject. We will be sure to cover that some other night. For now, I’m off to Safeway as they began restocking 100W light bulbs at midnight.