What a strange, strange Safeway…read more
The highlight of the place is that the first level of the building is the parking level. The only part of the "store" on this level is the staircase and elevator. Otherwise, I think the store takes up the entirety of the second floor. The elevator has a huge car that can fit many people and shopping carts, but it took a long time, both to be called and to move, when I was coming and going. It was only when I left that I noticed that there are actually two entrances: the one I used near the middle of the parking lot and the one farther north.
When you come up from the central stairs/elevator, it's as if you're inside any other Bay Area Safeway. Besides customer service being right next to this entrance, nothing else would alert you that you've floating over all this parking.
Like almost every other Bay Area Safeway, the layout is both familiar and slightly different. You'll generally find the bakery and produce sections on opposite sides, but beyond that, everything is just so. In this store's case, all the cheese is in a regular refrigerated aisle; in most stores, it's along the back wall. It's one of the few Safeway stores that hasn't added local street names to its aisles. That was cute at first, but now that seemingly every Safeway (and at least one Vons in SoCal) has that--and some of the names are misspelled or have the wrong street type--I'm over it. Aisle 3 can just be aisle 3. It doesn't have to double as El Camino Real.
I was shocked at how few people were in the store on a Saturday night. Because of this, I barely had to wait in line for checkout, and I was downstairs at my car pretty quick. The checker did a pretty poor job of bagging, but it wasn't atrocious, just wrong.
I happened to be returning some canned goods here when I came. When I got to customer service, a woman was arguing her point about some discount she received in addition to WIC or some other need-based debit card. Two different customer-service people were standing there listening to her argument, and even after they had each explained to her three times the different options for resolving her issue, she continued to argue. That's fine, more power to her, but I don't understand why one of the customer-service people couldn't start providing me with customer service. When I finally did speak to the younger person, she didn't know whether they would accept my return, and she had to wait for the other person to confirm that they wouldn't accept my return. For some reason, Safeway doesn't accept returns after thirty days, even with a receipt. These were canned goods that didn't expire until 2028, but a policy is a policy, I guess. I ended up leaving the cans there, because I didn't want them. When I left the store about a half-hour later, the cans were still sitting on the customer-service counter, untouched.
