This was based off of a post I wrote on Brazos Buildings & Businesses, which itself was based on a post from Two Way Roads, my old now-defunct blog and what BB&B spun off from.
This was the home of the first Albertsons in town, opened in 1991 near a major intersection with Wal-Mart next to it and Kmart across the way. Despite coming in with relatively low prices, thanks to the expansion of H-E-B Pantry and the pre-existing Kroger market, Albertsons would never really thrive in this town, despite beating or tying Kroger for store count of full line stores until 2006.
Despite blogging about this type of thing, my family actually never really shopped at Albertsons. Not because it was far away: it was actually one of the closest grocery stores to where we lived, but because the prices were substantially higher (and overall quality worse), so we ended up going to H-E-B Pantry Foods (and later a full-size H-E-B) and Kroger. Of course, while the Albertsons in question doesn't have a lot of fine memories for me, but I did visit it often enough to remember some things about it.
Around 2002, it remodeled, as the grocery market was heating up around it, probably to compete with the Kroger a mile north of it (an updated, albeit badly, Greenhouse model, and also one that outlasted a Winn-Dixie Marketplace catty-corner to it), and a large (Signature store) Kroger that opened in 2000 a mile south of it (also holding a Longmire address, natch).
The décor wasn't anything all that special (it certainly wasn't the "Grocery Palace", aka "Theme Park" décor), but I remember that a large mirror that you ran the length near the checkouts. Apparently it was where the break room and offices were. It also added a Starbucks Coffee kiosk. Sometime after the remodel, it also added a little Sav-on logo to the front. If I recall correctly, the remodel changed it to the "Marketplace" décor package from the "Blue & Gray" model.
Seeing as how I don't have interior pictures (a visit less than a year ago had the store gutted entirely down to a shell), I'm going to try to walk through what I remember. Albertsons had two doors on either side, you walked in the alcove, grabbed your cart, and in the right, that was where the bakery and deli sections were, in the back was a fairly long fish counter that always smelled like fish because they couldn't move the product fast enough, on the back left was the dairy and ice cream, and in the front you had the customer service section. I think the produce was on the left side, and the Starbucks was definitely on the right. There was also a video rental place, we went there around 2003-2004. The discs were scratched up and it even had some old N64 (maybe even SNES!) games for rental, but it was cheap. Later on, this was totally gutted for Texas A&M sports apparel (I think in 2005, which according to my records we visited after a weekend at Galveston, an adventure documented over at Two Way Roads), which would remain until the store's closure in 2008.
The summer 2008 closure seemed to confirm a long-standing rumor that Wal-Mart would buy the store for a Supercenter expansion, and in 2009, part of the store was demolished to make room for a physical expansion. After the Walmart was finished, the exterior walls of the old Albertsons were repainted a different shade of brown to match Walmart's color palette.
Walmart actually uses some of the space of the Albertsons for storage and occasional other uses (sometimes the front of the gutted store was used for hiring fairs), and there's even a physical connection to the current Walmart. In August 2017, the space reopened as Altitude Trampoline Park.
(Slight update 6/21/16)
