September 8, 1999

A little old lady from Park Pacifica

Something seems to have been overlooked in the recent flap over Safeway. All Safeway stores, without exception, eventually close. The Linda Mar store and the Pacific Manor store will close sooner or later, though it may take one or both another forty years. There were only 1680 Safeway stores the last time I checked, and not many of them have been around unchanged more than a few years, though Safeway itself has been around for 60 or 70 years. Over those years there must have been ten or twenty thousand Safeways. It's a competitive business, as the former employees and customers of Purity, Cala, Long's Markets, Petrini's, QFI, Super X, Pacific Markets, Landi's, Red Robin, etc. will attest. Take a drive some day and you'll see a lot of Safeway's ghosts. There's one on Pedro Point. There's another in Daly City, on the west side of 280 not far from Seton. There's another in Daly City over on Southgate and St. Francis, and there used to be one at Sharp Park Road and Skyline, and one on Westborough at 280. Safeway keeps making the new stores larger and fancier, adding departments, making them more efficient, more profitable designs. Those bakeries, produce departments, fish counters, delis, and branch banks aren't accidents. Each idea is planned out, refined, discussed. Every detail is thought out. The idea is to have fewer and fewer stores, each one drawing from a larger and larger area. A & P, (aka the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company) an eastern chain, used to be the biggest supermarket chain around. It had lots and lots of stores, most of them small. It was out-thought, out-spent, out-planned and out gunned. It's still around, but it's no longer the competitive giant it once was.

While Safeway, and Samtrans, and the San Mateo county library system were planning recent changes to meet their own needs and pressures, the human beings who live in Linda Mar and Park Pacifica and the senior complexes near Park Mall were planning their lives as if they could count on these corporate entities to stand like a rock and remain steady and reliable. Imagine a little old lady in January, 1999. She can't drive, but she's found a decent, affordable apartment at Pacific Oaks or Casa Pacifica. Safeway is across the street. The library is a block away. St. Peter's or Terra Nova Church Center is in walking distance, and Samtrans will take her to Linda Mar Shopping Center, where she can wait at the Park N Ride for a bus to BART, which would take her to Fremont, Concord, Walnut Creek or Pleasanton. Or she can ride to Powell Street, take the cable car over the hill and enjoy a shopping tour of Pier 39.

Now it's September. Safeway's gone. Samtrans doesn't run to Park Pacifica at all on weekends, nor will it take her to any evening meetings or parties. She has to be at Park N Ride by 7 pm or she walks the two miles home. The library's in grave danger of closing. Only the churches are ok, at least for now. For that sweet little old lady, it's been a bad nine months.

You're welcome to share your opinion of Safeway and Samtrans with Paul Azevedo via Paul@thereactor.net. It's unlikely either your opinion or his will change any corporate minds, however.