The Definitive DC Safeway Guide
Whether or not they admit it, everybody in Washington shops at Safeway. No other grocery store manages to squeeze such a suburban practice into such a convenient urban package and with such variety. While focus groups might dictate what's on the shelf in any given locale, it's the experience of the shopper that crowns the store with its colloquial title. Somehow the names stick, despite Washington's super-transient populace and shifting neighborhoods. Safeway, Inc. rejects these nicknames -- though if they had any business sense they'd embrace them wholeheartedly and erect a hammer and sickle on 17th Street. Instead, they keep insisting how they're so down with the new millennium 'cuz they play (cough) Coldplay on the speakers. Meanwhile the internet's all aflutter with arguments about which store is called what. As someone who's lived in Washington far too long and shopped at every single Safeway in the district, let me to tell you how it goes.
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Southwest Safeway
401 M St SW
Washington, DC 20024
On sale: O magazine, soul food lunch buffet. The barren corner of Washington's southwest quadrant is not unlike the dried-up parts of our own great nation. Though the … "Southwest" moniker lacks creativity, one can milk the metaphor by pointing out how reinforced concrete is just like adobe and how nobody in the city ever comes here because the area is boring and irrelevant. Kind of like Arizona's electoral votes. [link]
Un-Safeway
415 14th St SE
Washington, DC 20003
On sale: premixed peanut butter and grape jelly, pepper spray refill canisters. Play-on words sound funnier with bullets whizzing past your ear, right? There was a time … when Capitol Hill was a dangerous place to shop for groceries -- as in people shooting each other in the parking lot and stuff. Lucky for us, commenters insist that sections of Southeast are now completely safe. My sense of relief is huge. Although Eastern Market may no longer be home to the ghetto-ist grocery store in the city, the name still sticks. [link]
Senior Safeway
Watergate Complex, 2550 Virginia Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20037
[link]
Social Safeway
1855 Wisconsin Ave NW
Washington, DC 20007
On sale: sparkling water, hand sanitizer. How Safeway managed to infiltrate Georgetown remains a mystery, but today, the Wisconsin Avenue location is where pretty … people with money mingle freely with the masses. It's also where shoppers bearing cheerfully colored yoga mats can stand two abreast and gossip for hours on end, oblivious to the fact that they're blocking traffic, hence the "social." Add a healthy dose of cellphone chatter and spoiled toddlers and trust fund students. Think sanctimonious, sappy, selfish, soul-sucking ... the possibilities are quite endless. [link]
