Supermarket Designs

The Lempert Report
February 17, 2022

Sally: Phil, are you familiar with the director, John Chu? 

Phil : Of course, you know, Crazy Rich Asians. I love that. I think I've seen that like three times. 

Sally:Yeah, he's also, he's also the direct. He is, is the director of Crazy Rich Asians and also the director of In the Heights, which is, which is the adaptation, the film app, the adaptation of the musical, which is all about this, Latino community. So he has a lot of experience in celebrating ethnic culture, telling stories. And so it makes a lot of sense it's that the Asian retailer, we has now hired him as their Chief Creative Director. 

Phil : So I love this, but let me, let me fast track back probably about 30 years ago, Grand Union Supermarket, which, you know, as many people who were watching this might was a leading retailer. They had over 800 stores in their prime. And what they did is they actually went out and hired one of my teachers from prep, Milton Glazer and, and, Glazer designed all kinds of fabulous, logos. He actually came up with the, I love New York theme and, and Milton Glazer, redesigned Grand Union Supermarkets. And take a look, you know, at some of these pictures of what he did for the herb section, what he did for the outside of the store. I mean, private label, nobody had ever done private label packaging like this. Now these pictures are black and white, but they were in full color. And just, if you look how the, the cat's heads, you know, but up against each other, it was brilliant. Now, obviously it did not do a lot, for, for longevity of grand union, but it wasn't his fault. The owner of Grand Union at the time, passed away. It was then into a different company and so on and they just didn't. But I love this idea, the fact that we can go outside of our industry and go to other brilliant people to design our supermarkets of the future, thumbs up in a, in a big way,