A Texas-Owned Safeway

So, the last time I was in Houston, I took pictures of TWO candidates for this site just within a few blocks of each other: an H Mart on Blalock that was a Randalls prior to 2005 (but forgot to take a picture of the facade), and an older Safeway that was an El Ahorro (but didn't take a picture of the facade each other, just noting the distinctive hexagonal sign signaling that yes, this was a Safeway), and that Safeway was never an AppleTree.

It should be noted though that while Safeway spun off its Houston division in 1988, "Texas Supermarkets Inc." kept the names of the stores as Safeway well into 1989 until the AppleTree name was bestowed on them. Today's post is just an advertisement from June 1989 in the Houston Post, when the Houston division had not yet renamed but still spun off. I don't know what the "5-Star Program" was, must have been a failed plan to turn around the doomed chain and differentiate it in a rapidly changing market.

If things go well by next week, we can have a real post with photos and such, if things don't go as well, then there's one that I thought about earlier that won't have nearly as much pictures. Hopefully it's the former, and the latter will just be posted one of these days.