While Acme Style and Albertsons Florida Blog are off for vacation, I have returned. Why did we go offline in the first place? Well, only a few know the real answer.
In any case, we're back and back with stuff I had been working on prior to the hiatus. As part of a site "renovation", a few posts were culled until I can revive them somehow (a few other posts still remain to be reworked), and once again, we're working off of the dead Houston division, though rest assured—a new post on a San Antonio division store (South Texas) is coming soon, as well as another Bonus Store coming soon. The Houston division was one of the very first markets Albertsons pulled out of post-ASC and for good reason. There were, of course, a number of problems.
• Competition, for starters. From the time Albertsons entered to when they left, the Houston market was highly fragmented. In addition to Whole Foods (which had a few locations), supercenters (Wal-Mart Supercenter, Auchan, Super Kmart, although the latter two disappeared shortly after the departure of Albertsons), and independents hanging around (even AppleTree, the Safeway Houston division spin-off, still hung around with a few stores until 1997), there were the big guys. Randalls, of course, was #1 until 1999, and by 2002 they were losing a lot of ground under Safeway but still very much a threat. Kroger was building new "Signature" stores and unseated Randalls for #1, and they would keep that seat solidly (thanks to the acquisition of many Albertsons stores) until around 2013 when H-E-B caught up (today they bounce between #1 and #2), Rice Epicurean (a long-standing traditional Houston grocer that reinvented itself as a more upmarket store, though today it's down to a single location), and of course, the ever-growing threat of H-E-B, which by the time Albertsons left was beginning to upgrade its small "H-E-B Pantry" fleet into full-line full-featured stores.
• The expansion was part of a major store-build push in the 1990s that included the Southern United States as their main target. Albertsons was reaching a point where they almost (or perhaps did) have stores stretching across the I-10 corridor from California to Florida. To cap off their expansion, they bought American Stores, though that came at a heavy cost, namely rebranding Lucky to Albertsons (the Lucky stores would compose a third of the Albertsons store base in early 2000), which didn't go over so well.
• An inherently flawed plan that involved forcing their way into a crowded market where they would spend enormous resources for a market share.
• The weak economy (September 11th, Enron scandal, soft 2001 economy in general), though Albertsons denied this when they pulled out.
Above all, another major problem was building full-size stores in unproven locations. H-E-B Pantry did that to some extent but it was okay since their stores had little to no service departments and could shutter stores at little cost to the company. The closest analogue to H-E-B Pantry stores today would be Aldi, which had not entered the market at the time, and even that's not a great comparison, since Aldi doesn't sell a lot of name brands nor has a "real" supermarket elsewhere.
Make no bones about it, the Westheimer and Voss location as previously covered really was a good location...high traffic count, high population, and great access but failed due to the whole market situation and never became another supermarket again because everyone else had their own stores.
The East T.C. Jester store, not so much. This specimen and a few other stores in the area are especially perplexing, as things like this just seemed to suggest a "just throw them anywhere" attitude involving the Houston division, and that's not just speculative thinking...I've been told by someone who worked as a merchandiser for Frito-Lay that traffic count was not one of the things Albertsons looked at (some managers also had this particularly bizarre-like obsession with paperwork at the exact same time and signed by the right people, hearing him describe it brought to mind the film Brazil). This isn't a good thing if you're building large stores with full-service bakery, seafood, and deli departments.
The most immediate problem of this store (which originally had a larger parking lot, removed for a water retention pond) is that its access is very limited. Today, it only has one customer entrance in and out, but while the original design did include a few more entrances, it still had substantial access problems. There were a few other access portals on the side streets for trucks, but the surrounding roads are narrow and those don't do any favors for loading docks. I once spent several minutes stopped at one of the nearby roads for a truck to wriggle itself into a company that delivered flowers to florists.
I've spent a bit of time around this intersection and trying to navigate the area, and even getting into the former Albertsons driveway from the north was a pretty difficult experience. The building is certainly visible, but when you're trying to navigate the four way stops and then trying to make another left turn, it's easy to miss.
Compounding this access difficulty is the absence of traffic counts. I've been told that the road was extended circa 1999 as part of the deal of Albertsons coming. So you've got a dubious location to begin with, which is never good. The other things that tend to screw over individual locations are competition and demographics.
First, let's look at the immediate competition when this store was still alive.
Like the Bryan Albertsons, being the big dog in terms of being nice and big doesn't guarantee you success. Neither Foodarama (formerly an AppleTree/Safeway) or H-E-B (former Pantry, which we had covered here) are big stores but both draw a reasonable crowd for what they had. Generally, they were less expensive than Albertsons at this point, as well. To the southeast was (and is) a large Kroger, benefiting from the heavy crowds of Shepherd Drive, a four-lane, one-way road (the southbound traffic, Durham, goes behind Kroger). To the east was another Kroger, nestled in the Greater Heights area.
You'll also notice a large building with a dark roof at the northeast corner of the picture. This was a Kmart that opened in the 1970s and probably did okay (at least initially) because it was a Kmart. It closed in 2002 because it wasn't making a profit, and I believe it...I passed it by in 2011 for the first time and was astounded that a Kmart even existed in such a desolate location. Like the Albertsons, it didn't reopen as major retail, ending up becoming a dance studio and a wholesale store for the restaurant industry.
Both the H-E-B and Foodarama had better access and although they tend to draw a rather scruffy crowd (even in 2015), they at least seem moderately popular and have far better access. The Foodarama had been originally built as a Safeway and had been a Foodarama since 1994 when it took over the AppleTree that was there. The H-E-B had been built a few years prior but it replaced a legacy of grocery stores that dated back to the 1980s.
Furthermore, while it was true that the main Heights area was starting to gentrify at this time, the Heights had previously been a really bad area in the 1980s and building a giant supermarket in a neighborhood just starting to get on its feet isn't the best plan. The smarter move would've been to buy the land then build once demographics are favorable, but that wouldn't have worked if traffic counts are unknown and the city wants you to build. Even if the traffic counts weren't an issue, it was separated from the stores and neighborhoods west of the bayou and too far from the stores and neighborhoods east of it. In other words, this store was in the middle of nowhere.
Reality is this store wasn't open for much longer than two years. It quietly closed in February 2002 along with the Tidwell/Antoine store (another terrible, terrible location) and was never picked up by another supermarket. H-E-B could've picked it up like they did a few other Albertsons stores to upgrade Pantry locations, but they didn't.
Not all of the Houston stores were bad, far from it. There were some very nice locations that probably fetched the struggling Albertsons chain some cash as they were sold to other operators like Kroger or H-E-B. But combined with the problems that Albertsons was facing with some bad locations like this one doomed the entire division, one they wouldn't return to until 2015 when they bought Safeway, bringing the Randalls stores back, which is longer than the gap between Safeway spinning off their old Houston division and purchasing Randalls...and Randalls has problems of its own.
After it closed, a large part of the parking lot was removed for a retention pond (likely to prevent flooding) and it became a self storage facility called Heights Self Storage. In spring 2016, this changed to LifeStorage.
Welcome back! Glad to see the blog up and running again!
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