Bonus Store: The Littlest H-E-B

This post comes from the heels of a trip I took to Houston on Friday. I gotta admit, there was an Albertsons in the area where I went, now serving as a self-storage place. I wanted to get a picture of it, but it was out of the way and I was too embroiled in a four way stop to try to snap a picture of it. Makes me wonder how horrendous the intersection was when both the Albertsons and the Kmart catty-corner were both operating (today, the Kmart serves mostly as the home to "Restaurant Depot").

The subject today is a small H-E-B Pantry store in the Heights. It lost the Pantry name several years ago and now shares the same name as it does with its brethren, except it's a tiny little store that has nothing. Literally nothing. There's a booth for customer service, it has most of your dry dairy goods and a produce department, but no pharmacy, no florist, no seafood counter, no bakery, no tortilla machine, no sushi, no deli! This is the same chain that opened a store with the same name just earlier this month with a full restaurant, a wall of live plants, and 600 types of yogurt. It's as if Wegmans operated stores out of "Super Saver" era Acme storefronts missing most of the departments.

Sadly, once again, I lack interior pictures partly because the interior wasn't all that exciting...it used the same décor package from my c. 2002 store (only with no letters or graphics on the wall, just colorfully painted walls: I'm not sure if it's original to 1997 or not). A white guy in his mid-20s snapping pictures from an iPhone may have attracted some unwanted attention, so we'll have to do with exterior pictures. One of the things that was interesting to me was it's relatively late opening...August 1997, according to a plaque: a full five years after H-E-B started planting Pantry stores in town, and just about three years away from a full-line store opening. The August 1997 date suggests that there was another grocery store from a previous generation here.

The Original Bryan Weingarten - Bryan

From this photo gallery.

Safeway #1111
Address: 1010 Texas Avenue S. (originally 1010 College Avenue)
Bryan, TX
Opened (as Weingarten): 1954
Opened (as Safeway): 1984
Became AppleTree: 1989
What's There Now: Rockies, C&J Barbecue, Bingo Barn

This post was originally based on "Weingarten Supermarket, Bryan" from Brazos Buildings & Businesses

Weingarten was an old-line Houston supermarket chain (it became a real estate manager later), colloquially Weingarten's (which was on the sign). While a lot of Weingarten stores became Safeway stores in Houston (and later AppleTree), not all of them did--the companion College Station store which lasted no more than around 2 months, Weingarten's here lasted for about three decades before it changed hands and closed less than a decade later. Either way, Safeway's time with Weingarten, from picking up many stores in 1984 to spinning off the chain in the late 1980s with the AppleTree division wasn't a long time, but it was important.

Opening on September 1, 1954, the 25,000 square foot supermarket was not only the largest in Bryan, but featured a variety of things unusual at the time, though may seem commonplace today. These included a self-service deli, a general merchandise department "where the housewife can find everything from work clothes to dresses to cooking equipment", a drug and tobacco department, "magic carpet" automatic doors, a lunch counter, a children's daycare area "where they'll find comic books and other things to keep their attention", and a full-service butcher department. Courtesy of John Ellisor, check out the article from which these great facts were derived from.

While I can't imagine much general merchandise fitting in an area that seems pretty small itself for a grocery store, nevertheless, Weingarten stayed in this spot for nearly the next three decades before Weingarten's owners at the time, Grand Union, decided to divest the division.

The Weingarten was unceremoniously sold to Safeway in January 1984 but I don't know if Safeway rebranded the store or closed it and reopened it under its own name. Confusingly, the store remained open as the Safeway store at William Joel Bryan and North Texas Avenue did so (just a mile north) until that store moved in 1986 to Culpepper North (which would later be the last AppleTree store, ever). The sale of many Weingarten stores to Safeway was ultimately the undoing of the Houston division and later the AppleTree chain, as the Weingarten stores added to the Safeway Houston Division store count but were horribly dated by the mid-1980s and there wasn't ultimately any money to renovate the stores.

When AppleTree filed for bankruptcy in January 1992, the store at 1010 South Texas Avenue (originally 1010 South College Avenue, which was the road that ran on the store's west side), this one was one of the first go after just a mere three years, especially considering that the original Weingarten had been going for 30 years under that name. By the time AppleTree completely spun off as a fully independent chain with just half a dozen stores, this store had been referred to as one of the "dogs" as described by Richard Goeggel, VP of AppleTree at the time.

FOUR AppleTrees in town! No wonder College Station-Bryan kept AppleTree through 2009.
Later becoming Williams Furniture Company (see comments on the original BB&B page), part of the store is used to host 1016 S. Texas Avenue, a space used as a nightclub. Some basic Google searching shows that there was "Prime Time Nightclub" and "Whiskey River" recently, the latter predating the former, but not by much, but now it's Rockies (full name: "Rockies The Canyon") moved from its long-time spot at Post Oak Mall. 1018 S. Texas Avenue has been Bingo Barn for years, and at 1010 S. Texas Avenue, C&J Barbecue hangs off of the end, which I didn't get too good of a picture of. Note that despite the visible "old" C&J logo above, it's not the original location.

The pictures are bad because the sun was setting and I was taking it out of the car window (the neighborhood seemed a bit sketchy, although it was still daytime, I might've gotten out). I want to make another return trip to it, see if I can find more things about it. Mysteries abound still: as shown by the gallery linked above, there's a chimney in the back (and not on the C&J BBQ side either) and a lack of modern loading docks. I wondered if it had a railroad spur at one time, and that may be actually the case (a spur definitely ran through the area where Advance Auto Parts is, just south of the store). After all, trucks weren't as commonplace in 1954 as today, and shipping things from Brownsville sounds awfully harrowing for trucks in 1950s-era highways. But I don't know of any grocery stores in the 1950s that actually had railroad spurs. If anyone knows more about this store, such as that.

Safeway's First Island Excursion, The Galveston H-E-B Pantry - Galveston

Last seen alive in August 2008
Safeway #????
6013 Stewart Road
Galveston, TX
Open: 1979?
Closed: 1987
Currently: Odyssey Academy

For all you Safeway fans out there, this one's kind of an interesting story because it's one of those rare cases where Safeway wins a part of Houston. This one was opened in the 1970s (local county appraisal district says built 1970, but ""effectively" 1979, so that would seem the date, given a 1974 aerial is still vacant) as a Safeway, the only one on the island, and for seven years (at the very least) it served Galveston Island as part of the Houston until Safeway Inc. started to run into trouble, getting the axe in 1987 as part of a round of closings that would serve as a predecessor to spinning the whole division a few years later (hence, this never became an AppleTree).

Luckily for Galveston, it did become a grocery store again, reopening as an H-E-B Pantry in 1990, as part of the new H-E-B Pantry concept introduced in 1988. The Pantry stores lacked much of the things that real H-E-B stores had, or even grocery stores of the day. The prototype had "only four departments: grocery, meat, produce, and health and beauty", so things like a deli and bakery, and even a pharmacy, were out of the question.

And so for the next 15 years, the Pantry remained. It brought a smile to my face every time we were in Galveston, because of the familiarity of the H-E-B Pantry, and even moreso (post-2002, such as 2005) after the old local H-E-B Pantry stores closed as they were replaced with full-line stores. It was still operating in 2008 (hence, the picture). But something happened in September 2008: Hurricane Ike. It flooded the store, ruining all the inventory, and H-E-B took the opportunity that a few other retail stores did by taking the insurance money and not reopening (the Dillard's at the Mall of the Mainland as well as the Macy's in Northwest Mall did the same thing). The long-rumored plans to open a full-line H-E-B on the island disappeared, leaving residents with only Randalls and Kroger to shop at.

And here's the ironic thing: Randalls, which was on the island as part of the independent chain's reach across Houston and later purchased by Safeway, was one of the first grocery retailers to reopen. As for this store, H-E-B sold the store to a charter school, which renovated it significantly, even on the outside.

Here are some aerials taken over the years. There's a smaller building adjacent to the Safeway, which I would wager was a drug store, probably an Eckerd. This is what likely sustained the strip after Safeway left (in 2007, this space was vacant and wasn't refilled until Odyssey came in).

Over the years:

1974

1982

1990: First Year of the Pantry

1995

2004. Last time the gas station shows up.

January 2008

September 2008, city evacuated

2010, newly paved parking lot

2012, front part removed

The title refers to Safeway's first excursion to Galveston Island, before anyone tries to point out that Safeway had Hawaii stores in the first part of the 20th century.

Albertsons Memorabilia!

Even though I've admitted that my family were never Albertsons shoppers and even up until recently I tended to view Albertsons as a more expensive version of Kroger, which due to various reasons, I didn't like at the time (that opinion has changed too).

That being said, I do have some miscellaneous Albertsons memorabilia.

This first one is the more ancient one (an old jar of alum in the pantry), and while it does say the company name on the sticker, I've figured it had to have come through a former Skaggs-Albertsons when it dissolved in the late 1970s, as my mother did live in Florida at the time. I'm almost certain that it came from #4314, the Gainesville store that lasted up until 2011.

The second one is more decidedly modern, an Albertsons Pharmacy dropper, and I'm guessing that it came from the local store, #2702, because if we were going to Albertsons, that's the one we'd go to.

Randalls #1857 - Houston, TX

An unremarkable store? (Photo by me. I'm not sure what thing is in the NW corner)
Randalls #1857
Address: 12312 Barker Cypress Road
Cypress, TX
Opened: September 2001

So it's here. Randalls, Tom Thumb, and the entire Safeway family are now married into the Albertsons family, which recently got back together from a painful divorce and the former American Stores rescued from their abusive stepfather SuperValu (okay, I'll stop with the analogies now), but that wasn't yet the case when I stopped at this Randalls after a job interview in the Houston area.

Sadly, I didn't pull out the camera inside for reasons unknown, but I did sample something from the bakery (a chocolate chip cookie baked onto a brownie!) and bought a coffee with the last of my Starbucks card. A bit about this store is that it was built in an era where Safeway had purchased Randalls and was still opening stores before changing gears around the start of the "Lifestyle" era and closing a bunch of Randalls stores in 2005 as market share deteriorated and a market pull-out seemed imminent. I visited this store hoping it hadn't yet been remodeled to "Lifestyle" yet (unfortunately, all of the remaining Randalls did get the do-over), but it was, and altogether wasn't a bad look. Because I didn't actually take any pictures inside, this post is going to be pretty brief.

When the Randalls opened in 2001, there wasn't a lot in the way of grocery shopping in the area. It was the last grocery store along the 290 corridor before a rinky-dink store in the Hockley/Waller area, but even in those halcyon days, Randalls wasn't bursting at the seams. The only other thing close was a 1999 H-E-B Pantry, a small-format store that lacked a pharmacy, deli, and fresh bakery (at least that was the prototype).

Randalls by itself in 2002

Even though the trade area continued to grow with subdivisions continuing to sprawl outward, the greatest threat to Randalls' well being happened in 2007 when H-E-B decided to replace a Pantry store a few miles away (despite the fact that said H-E-B Pantry was renovated at least once in its less-than-a-decade lifespan). Immediately, the new H-E-B zoomed to be the more popular in the area, packing out routinely. It was also larger than Randalls.

H-E-B steals the show in 2010

It's possible that the renovation came in the late 2000s to try to combat the influence of H-E-B.

H-E-B still maintains popularity

Since that time, Randalls has still held on. The H-E-B is cheaper than Randalls as well as not requiring a card, and has continued to march west with new stores while Randalls has stagnated.

If Randalls wishes to take its closest competition on, it's got to lower prices to be competitive (an impediment to the original Safeway Inc.), follow the Albertsons lead and remove the card, and perhaps cannibalize its own shopping center to expand floor space (perhaps making the store deeper by going through the back!) It won't unseat the king anytime soon...Randalls will probably never take #1 in grocery market share (behind Walmart, of course) without an expensive and aggressive building strategy, but knocking Kroger and H-E-B down a few notches will at least secure its place in the market.

As always, comments are appreciated.