Today was the first time I saw any part of the interior of Seattle's new(ish) second-tallest building, Rainier Square Tower, topped out at 58 floors and 850 feet in 2020, but not opened until 2021. The PCC Downtown store that was long planned as the anchor tenant on the ground floor level was originally slated to open in 2020, predictably pushed to 2021 by the pandemic, and postponed yet again in 2021 to "late 2021 or early 2022" due to there still being little business potential while the pandemic was ongoing. The general idea now seems to be that we opened the store today, at 9:00 this morning to be precise, because we had contractual obligations with the lease agreement to open no later than this.

Shobhit has the day off of work today and so it was fairly easy to convince him to walk downtown with me to see the "ribbon cutting," or, as you'll see in the video below, PCC's store-opening tradition of "fruit cutting," in this case a pomelo. Have I ever even heard of a pomelo before?

Anyway, we left home at 8:30 and took 25 minutes to walk down there. Overall I took 17 photos, so I decided that justified their own photo album on Flickr. (The only other time a new store opening got its own photo album was Greenlake Village in 2014, but I may take others even with just a few photos and create dedicates albums so I can create a collection of albums dedicated to store openings.) I was thinking, while we were walking, about how this was the first time I have ever been present for the "fruit cutting" the minute a store was opened to the public. I actually could have gone to the Central District one fairly easily, back on June 17, 2020, as I was working from home then too and CD is actually over a quarter of a mile closer to home. It's just that, at that time, we were all of three months into the pandemic and I was concerned about adding to a potentially covid-dangerous crowd; I only went to check out the store at lunchtime that day because Scott convinced me it wasn't very crowded.

For multiple reasons, though, Downtown is a different animal, not least of which is its geography and specific location: I have long been thrilled at the idea that it's the anchor tenant of a brand new Seattle skyscraper. Also, once I am back to working at the office again, it will actually be more convenient, at least for small-basket needs, than CD is, because it's all of two blocks out of my way on my commute. Indeed, I thought about this today too: as easy as it was to walk there from home this morning, even if I were working at the office today, there's a very good chance I still would have gone, as it's still only 1.4 miles from the office (nearly the exact same distance it is from home). And yes, the pandemic continues now, but life is much closer to normal, even with everyone continuing to wear masks, than it was in June of 2020, so even in the face of Omicron, I just double-masked and went down to see the fanfare and then check out the store and even do a little shopping.

I saw several people I knew there, many who have long been working on setting up the store. I clocked both Noah and Scott in the crowd of store staff who came outside for the few minutes of ceremony before letting the public in, but the first person I had a real conversation was Steven, who told me how surprised he was by how "just like a PCC" it turned out to be—even after being there long days to set up his department (Health and Body Care). He's right, too: Scott had long been kind of conditioning me to expect a tiny store, and although the Grocery aisles (the department in which both he and I work) clearly are smaller in overall size than any other store, the whole store is still 20,000 square feet (technically 17,543, last I was given an official tally) and that's only fourth-smallest, of our now 16 stores in the Seattle region. Kirkland, Greenlake Aurora, and View Ridge are all smaller, although Kirkland is about to move into a new and much larger location about a mile from its current one in roughly six weeks, which will then make Downtown our third-smallest store.

In any case, it has a fully "PCC feel," as Steven noted, and there's an interesting effect when you come in the main entrance on Fourth Avenue: as in all stores, you walk through Produce first. But, you have to go about halfway back before you notice another section of maybe four grocery aisles to the left and a bit further back from the Deli kitchen.

We did notice three separate entrances, and I got photos at all of them. The main entrance is on Fourth Avenue, and that's the only public entrance that is direct from the street. The south entrance opens to a common area of the building where people come from the parking garage (that's the middle photo in this post, above), and then there is a north entrance that opens out into the building's rather large two-story lobby area, going down a few steps to an area where you can either go up an escalator to the building's office floors, or another regular staircase up to elevators to the residences, which are floors 39 to 58.

We found ourselves being the first-ever transaction at one of the two registers set up right by that north entrance, and when we went out to the lobby and saw the escalator without any barrier, we went up them to the second floor, where we found a young security guard at a large desk, and the elevator banks. This was a very wide open space spanning the width of the building, and we asked the guard a couple of questions about the building, finding him perfectly friendly and unthreatened by us.

Anyway, before we bought our stuff, I did have brief encounters with other staff. There's the new-ish guy named Taylor, I think, who was the first to say hi to me (calling me "Matt," a habit I need to disabuse him of); he tried to tell me "You can go in" but he must have assumed I was working the store. I probably could have gone inside regardless, but I did have Shobhit with me and, while I was taking photos of the ceremony outside the entrance before everyone was let in, Shobhit was holding a space for us in line.

Oh, and I almost forgot, right after encountering Taylor, I ran into Ayn (pronounced "Ann"), a rep from one of the bigger brokerages we work with, who was there to take some photos and videos of her own, she said for their company newsletter. She said hi to me and then said, "Matthew, you are just amazing!" I laughed and said, "You say that every time you see me." She went on to tell me how much I stand apart from people she works with at other retailers, which was very nice to hear. She also introduced me to Chris, who works with her at Presence Marketing, and with whom I've exchanged many emails but had never met in person before.

And later, after being inside, I saw Darrell and Justine, both of whom said hi to me. I said hi to a few other people too, but the less-brief encounter was with Scott and Noah, and particularly Scott, when after we had paid for our small batch of groceries, Shobhit noted that he probably won't ever see Scott again, given Scott is leaving PCC at the end of the month. So I decided we should indeed seek out Scott and say hi to him. Once I finally found him, Shobhit had lots of questions about the store that Scott was happy to answer, and Scott even gave us a minor behind-the-scenes tour, taking us back to the very small back room (which is really just a narrow hallway), and even showing us both the Dairy refrigerator and the freezer, both of which are surprisingly large.

We had come back out of the back area with Scott and Noah met up with us all again, and an incredibly handsome young man who turned out to be the Grocery Lead came up to wait patiently for conversation to subside before he asked Scott a question. Then, new people came up at virtually the same time to pull both Scott and Noah separately away from conversation with us, so I took that as our cue to go ahead and leave and head back home.

We took the bus, at Shobhit's request. Hopefully this won't result in another "exposure notification" from my phone. It was about a ten minute ride, but multiple people on the bus either did not have their masks on properly or on at all, and this was my first time on transit since the end of December, as I've been avoiding it during the Omicron surge. A couple of young men who Shobhit deduced were both a gay couple and on meth (he was generalizing; he could be right but there was no hard evidence) got on at the same time we did. One of them was wearing purple mesh shorts with no underwear on, one of the most nuts things I have ever seen in public. Like, if you aren't specifically paying attention you might easily think they were regular shorts. But if I noticed, surely other people did too. I didn't like the guy only because he got on the bus merely holding his mask in his hands. I had at first gone to the back of the bus in an attempt to avoid such people, but that very guy and his friend came right back there too so I got up and moved back to the middle of the bus. I didn't realize until we got off at our stop that another dipshit had been sitting right by us with his mask below his chin. Jesus Christ.

[posted 12:30 pm]