19283 Coastal Highway
Welcome to the Rehoboth Beach Safeway!
Welcome back to The Retail Connection! We are here in Rehoboth Beach, one of the most popular beach destinations in Delaware. The town and surrounding areas have several supermarkets, and we'll be checking some of them out over the next weeks. We're starting with the Safeway, which opened on November 17, 2005 and marked Safeway's return to the town after their previous store closed back in 1987 due to their brief exit from the Delmarva. Let's step inside and take a look around!
We're heading in through the entrance marked DriveUp & Go. Acme also has this service, although I've never seen signage like this for it.
Floral is to the left past the entrance. As you can see, this store has the "Woodgrain" variant of Lifestyle v3. Only three other stores have this version of the decor, and they are all in Oregon.
Fresh fruit and organic selections take up most of the left of the store. I guess Albertsons is doing a price lock campaign right now, as Acme has these signs in their stores as well.
Lunch meats are in the back right corner, dividing green paint and brown paint.
Up next are service meat and seafood and packaged meats.
Looking down aisle 4, the breakfast aisle. The aisle and category markers are unchanged from the standard version of this decor.
Photo courtesy of Retail Forever
Here's a look at the same aisle in 2021, provided by Retail Forever. You can read their post on this store by clicking here.
And a closeup of one of the category markers.
Weirdly, the pharmacy is in the back of the store. I believe this is normal for Safeway, but most stores I know put pharmacies along the front wall.
Dairy is in the back right corner. It kind of bothers me how the "half & half" sticker on that freezer to the right is totally different from all the other ones. That looks more like what you would see in an Acme.
The fresh bakery and bread are on the right wall. The phrase "oven fresh and irresistible" was carried over from Lifestyle v2, and it always makes me laugh for some reason.
The service deli is in the front left corner next to bread and rolls.
A look down the front end at the checkout lanes and a lot of Sincerely, Food signage. Other than self checkout, only the express lane was open.
Customer service and beach merchandise are on the front wall, with "Thank you for shopping Safeway" above the latter. That area used to be a Starbucks which was removed during the remodel.
This store has a Safeway Express gas station in the parking lot. Until recently, the canopy used the pre-2005 Safeway logo, which is strange considering the store itself was one of the first to use the current one.
Other Images of Interest
Street View Images
2019
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Not much has changed other than the exterior signage for DriveUp & Go and pharmacy.
Nearby competition
0.6 miles away: Giant of Rehoboth Beach
Just down Coastal Highway is the Rehoboth Beach Giant. This store opened in 1999 as one of the last to be built before Ahold took over the chain. The store originally used the Super G name but was converted to Giant in 2005 and received the updated logo in 2008. Inside, this store has the current Giant of Landover decor.
0.8 miles away: Aldi of Rehoboth Beach
The Rehoboth Beach Aldi opened in 2021 in part of a former Kmart. The Kmart lasted until February 2020 and was the last location in Delaware and the Delmarva as a whole. The store was significantly downsized before closure, and Aldi actually takes up most of what Kmart's final footprint was.
0.8 miles away: The Fresh Market of Rehoboth Beach
The Fresh Market opened here in 2016 along with a now-closing Bed Bath & Beyond on what used to be an empty lot. It is the only location in the state of Delaware.
1.9 miles away: Acme of Rehoboth Beach
The Acme opened in November 2015 in a former SuperFresh, which opened in 1999. Acme and Safeway are both owned by Albertsons, so technically they're competing with themselves, although both stores have coexisted for almost eight years so they must both do well.
I think that about does it for this post! This was my first time in a Safeway in a while, and other than the store being extremely cold and no normal registers being open, I found it to be a pretty nice supermarket. Next week, we're headed further south to see a grocer with only two Delaware locations. Don't miss it! Thanks for shopping with The Retail Connection: Ingredients for life.
I didn't realize Safeway had pulled out of this area just to return in the 2000's - I thought Safeway's DC division was doing more shrinking than growing during that time, so it's nice they were trying to re-establish the brand in areas they left during that time.
ReplyDeleteMaybe this isn't as much of a problem in person, but the white lettering against the wood background seems to make the department signs harder to read, although that could just be the spotlights behind the signs messing with the camera. Other than that the decor looks pretty good, although I'm torn on which decor looked better in here, Woodgrain v3 or Lifestyle v1. I guess that's a good thing, as it's nice when a store remodels to a decor that fits the building just as well as the original.
Yeah, Safeway closed all of their Delaware stores and also some Maryland locations in February 1987. Some were sold to SuperFresh but a lot of them just closed outright. I believe Dover was the first new Delaware store to open in 2000/2001, followed by the three Genuardi's in the state in 2004 and then this location in 2005.
DeleteI think the signs being hard to read is just a camera trick, because they were definitely readable in person. Personally, I prefer this decor over v1, even though the store was built with that. I think my Lifestyle ranking would be (best to worst) v3 (Woodgrain), v3, v2, v1, and v3 (Corrugated Metal).