Back when Safeway and Albertson's were merging, it seemed like a bit of a non-event here in New Mexico where we only have Albertson's. I was peripherally aware that this wasn't always the case: at Central and Tennessee, and at 4th and Cutter, are two buildings that I was told years ago were former Safeways.
And then one day I really looked at the Food King (not so long ago Lowes), further north on 4th at Griegos, and it is obviously a Marina-style Safeway.
Turns out that Safeway was a major grocer in Albuquerque from about the 1930s (when the two stores I mentioned first opened) until the 1980s, when, at the apex, there were 44 Safeway locations in New Mexico.
In 1987, Safeway was in financial distress and sold its entire El Paso Division (which included almost all of the New Mexico stores) to Furr's. Originally a Texas-based chain of cafeteria-style restaurants and stores, by the late '80s Furr's was mostly owned by a consortium of German investors and was the parent company of a number of smaller regional grocery chains in NM.
Furr's continued to operate them under the Safeway name for a few years until they were all rebranded as Furr's in 1990 (apparently Safeway made a deal to license the name to Furr's for a few years to ease the transition).
It didn't work out that much better for Furr's: in 2001, they went bankrupt. Some of the stores had already been sold by that point, but those that remained under the Furr's brand were liquidated and scattered to the winds. Some of them are still abandoned, 25 years later.
