Bristol Farms Westchester (Los Angeles, California)

Source: The Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1979
I'm doing something significantly different today with the first California post on Numbered Exits, this time exploring the history of 8448 Lincoln Boulevard in Westchester, California. This opened in March 1979 as Alpha Beta, with the newspaper advertisement as shown above. The journey to its current tenant, Bristol Farms, began working in 1988 (when the store was less than a decade old) when parent company American Stores Company purchased rival Lucky Stores, triggering a lawsuit by the California Attorney General. In the end, American Stores converted most of the Alpha Beta stores in Northern California to Lucky, with only a small portion in Southern California converted. The rest of the chain (numbering about 145 stores) was sold to Yucaipa Companies (which ultimately sold them to rival supermarket chain to Ralphs). This was one of the ones that remained with American Stores and rebranded as Lucky around 1991.

Google Street View as of this writing. In 1999, American Stores itself was purchased by Albertsons, which converted the store to its own brand and a few years later, in the midst of ongoing restructuring efforts, purchased the small Bristol Farms gourmet foods chain. In July 2005, the decision was made to close down this Albertsons store and convert it to Bristol Farms.

While it was small for Albertsons standards, it was Bristol Farms' largest when it reopened in July 2006 with a major inside-and-out renovation. (The Albertsons employees were sent to other stores). By that time, however, Bristol Farms was under new ownership (through "New Albertsons Inc.", a subsidiary of SuperValu). SuperValu then sold the Bristol Farms chain to investors (through a company called Good Food Holdings) in 2010, which in 2018 was sold to Korean retail chain Emart. I've never been to this store so I don't have pictures of the inside, but the story of this one is interesting enough.