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Saturday, June 27, 2015

The Last AppleTree - Bryan

A brief stay as "Food City". Picture from Stalworth Online. This is after a repaint.


Safeway #736
Address: 2001 Highway 21
Bryan TX
Opened: 1986
Became AppleTree: 1989
Closed: 2009?

Rounding out the four Safeway stores that died as AppleTree in Bryan-College Station, today we have the fourth. Originally written as a post on Brazos Buildings & Businesses, this was one of the last group of Houston Division Safeway stores to be built, and the very last AppleTree store to close.

With the larger Weingarten store in the Safeway family just a few miles south, a decision was made to close the original downtown store, and have it replaced with a larger store a few miles north, giving it some more distance from the second Safeway (a third Safeway in town was more toward the east part of town by then).

This particular Safeway opened in early 1986 as store #736 and the anchor of the small Culpepper North, a shopping center at Highway 21 and Texas Avenue. It replaced the store at Texas Avenue and William Joel Bryan (#294, that's now the Health Department). By 1988, however, Safeway had already spun off the division, and in 1989, the new company had changed names to AppleTree.

Almost immediately, of course, AppleTree began to suffer, and the "apples" began to fall. Declaring bankruptcy in early 1992, one of the first to go was the former Weingarten store, and within 24 months, the chain went from 95 to about 6. The new independent chain lost its last stores in Houston and Huntsville within a few years after that, but the remaining few stores soldiered on. The first signs that AppleTree was about to go away forever was in 2002, when the College Station store closed, unable to fend off a huge H-E-B that opened a stoplight away. The Briarcrest store, having been replaced in the late 1980s and one of the most modern, up to date stores in the chain (though hardly up to date or large in modern standards), went next, selling the store to the landlord when the lease ran out, who kept it open and renamed it. Finally, this one was left, and remained until around late 2009 when the AppleTree letters came off in favor of a store called "Super Canasta", which was a Hispanic supermarket (there is a color AppleTree picture on Yelp, albeit tiny).

No bravado followed this passing of the AppleTree name, and for all intents and concerns, AppleTree had been dead for years, just another no-name company that was a client of Grocers Supply Co. in Houston. Super Canasta soon gave way to Food City (owned by El Ahorro) which gave it its own name in a matter of months. Food City/El Ahorro was the first to do away with the old Safeway/AppleTree décor, and in summer of 2013, El Ahorro sold to La Michoacana Meat Market, which downsized and didn't use all the store space (it wasn't very large to begin with). You'll notice that all the stores are supplied by the same company, so the store names still have the same trucks coming in. In the same plaza, there's also a Family Dollar (since day one?) and a few other stores.

By the way, until a few years ago, there was an AppleTree in San Diego, which had been there since at least 2005-2006. The sign looks slightly different than the Bryan ones (looks they painted solid colors over the apples and the logo), but there's no relation, and it's likely they bought the sign from Texas. It's worth wondering about: there were once nearly 100 of these things, some sign exists somewhere.

Finally, here's an article and some small black and white shots of some of the Bryan AppleTrees from a 2004 BTU article. What's interesting is that every single mainstream Bryan supermarket has closed or moved since 2004. The AppleTree on Briarcrest was the least affected, and it closed and reopened with a different name. Everything else moved (Kroger, H-E-B), or flat out closed (Albertsons, the other AppleTree in Bryan).

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