Place on the wrong side of the railroad tracks…read more
If you live in North Sunnyvale south of 101, this is the main shopping center for you. I bought my first house a 15 minute walk away from here in 1979 for $113,000, and lived here from 1979 to 1988, shopping here all the time. I still have that starter house nearby as a rental, with the similar house next door selling for $1.5 million in June!
One rainy evening I was traveling west on Maude Ave, getting into the left turn lane to turn into this shopping center, to pickup pizza, when bang, I was T-boned on the driver side of my 1984 Honda Accord. No airbags in cars in the 1980s. Almost met my maker!
Turned out the culprit was an engineer from a nearby firm, driving a rental car, fresh off the plane from Japan, where they drive on the left hand side of the road. His insurance company had the audacity to try to charge me with loss of use for the rental car!
Not much has changed through the years. Shopping center is anchored by a Lucky's supermarket, and other stores include KFC, Prestige Wine & Liquors, a 7-11, a Valero gas station, a barber shop, a bagel shop, a Bank of America branch, with Wendy's and a 7 story LinkedIn building across the 8 lane Mathilda expressway, at the traffic lights. Only the pizza joint is gone.
Today Saturday morning, I make a 2 mile drive from the Las Palmas Park area, passing Safeway, Sprouts, Trader Joes, and Target, four prominent supermarkets in the area, on my way to Lucky in this shopping center. Something good has to be on sale for me to drive past 4 supermarkets to Luckys.
There used to be another Luckys on El Camino Real and Bernardo, but that fell victim to the scam scandal, where thieves in 2011 attached skimming devices to steal credit card numbers on the self check out card machines!
I park my 2017 Honda Fit right in front of Luckys. The Fit replaces my 1998 Honda Civic, the most stolen car in America, not a car you want to leave overnight in this area, the sketchy area of Sunnyvale. Both cars are stick shifts, something the new generation of car thieves don't have the skills to drive.
Go inside and get 2 lbs of the $9.94 Atlantic Salmon fillets on sale for $6.77 a pound, cheaper than Sprouts $8.99 a pound. Got to remember not to get the sockeye Salmon, which tastes more like a white fish.
Other items include four bottles of $4.99 Simply Orange Juice, at $3 each, and two 10 ounce boxes of $1.99 Knott's Berry Farm's raspberry shortbread cookies at $1.39 each. The cookies are all broken up. The Simply Orange Juices are not as good a deal as they seem, ever since the bottle size was reduced from 59 ounces to 52 ounces earlier this year. Sneaky!
Everything is hunky dory until I come to the self check out line, as it takes some doing to get the bill finalized.
Prices here are on the high side, except for the sale specials. They are selling a ready to eat 30 ounce cooked rotisserie chicken for $10, when Safeway and Sprouts sells it for $8, and Costco $5 for a 48 ounce chicken. And Luckys certainly has lower rental costs than Safeway and Sprouts.
Higher cost to cover losses from higher shoplifting rates and bounced checks, as crime rate substantially higher than south of the railroad tracks. But good for holdups, as freeway less than 2 minutes away!
