Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Volume 2, Number 18: The Rise of Anubis

(Note: This is a re-posting of an entry I made in June 2007 on a Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)

I set foot in a Farmer Jack store for the final time this morning. The store I went to, on 12 Mile and Campbell, was much closer to empty than I had expected.

As it happens, today, Anubis Market announced that it would buy the 12/Campbell location and two other Farmer Jacks.

Now, you might say, "Anubis? I've never heard of that. Sounds weird."

I meant Hollywood Markets, not Anubis.

I have had the habit of referring to Hollywood as "Anubis" ever since I moved to Royal Oak in 2000 (I had not even heard of Hollywood until then). The reason is in the illustration above: The first time I saw the Hollywood logo (left), it reminded me instantly of Anubis Market, a fictitious supermarket depicted in the Steven Spielberg-produced animated series, Freakazoid! The "logo" for Anubis is remarkably similar to the Hollywood logo, suggesting (to me, anyway) that the Hollywood was used as the basis for the Anubis one. Both have characters wearing aprons who point behind them with their thumbs.

Now, I'm not terribly thrilled with Anubis--OK, fine, Hollywood--replacing Farmer Jack on 12 and Campbell. I actually shop Hollywood even less frequently than Farmer Jack or Oak Ridge (not to mention Meijer and Kroger) because their sale ads are generally so unimpressive. What I mean is, you don't see a whole lot of 50% off specials, and 99 times out of 100, whenever Hollywood has something on special that I buy, I don't go there because sooner or later, Meijer (or even Kroger) will come up with a better special.

Then again, the 12/Campbell location is much more convenient for me than their Main/11 location, and maybe once they take over the three ex-Farmer Jacks, they'll be able to give me better sale prices as the result of their buying in greater volumes. Hollywood, which presently has four stores, will end up with seven now.

I should be glad that at least there will be a store on 12 and Campbell; after all, the strip mall near it would have struggled much more than it already is, even with Farmer Jack. That strip mall once boasted a drug store and a video rental store; since then, the drug store has closed and the video rental store has been replaced by a dollar store (called Dollar Expo).

But I would rather have seen a clone of Ferndale Foods--a Spartan store that doubles coupons up to $1.00, but whose sale ad I almost never receive, whose web site is useless, and whose location is a pain in the butt to drive to (although it's just a few miles, there must be 12 traffic lights along the way, and it's too damn close to Oak Park and Detroit).

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