The Players

To make sense of this blog, there are several categories of which are to be looked at that will come into the whole "Safeway/Albertsons merger" business that will come together to make sense of the entire story in what we're covering in this blog.

Safeway
Safeway was one of the oldest grocery stores in America, so it would make sense that they opened stores in Texas even by the 1950s. By the mid-1970s, they were all over Texas in the divisions of Dallas and Houston (I'm not sure if they had any San Antonio), with smaller towns among them.

However, despite their success and being toe-to-toe with Kroger in several of the markets they were in, Safeway Inc. ran into trouble and had to sell their stores in many markets. This wasn't the best situation for the stores they had: many of them were out of date by the late 1980s, and the stores went through two tracks.

The Dallas division disappeared with some of the better stores picked up by competitors, like Minyard, while the Houston division was bought by management and created a 100-store chain called AppleTree Markets in 1989.

AppleTree struggled as their competitors. The market wasn't going too well, and AppleTree filed for bankruptcy protection in 1992, though keeping all but their rattiest stores, some of which were 1950s stores inherited from Safeway acquired some Weingarten stores in 1984.

Downstream, a price war initiated by Food Lion and H-E-B Pantry forced AppleTree to lower prices, while upstream larger, more established chains like Kroger, Randalls, and even Fiesta came up with new concepts and better stores.

AppleTree eventually sold off all but six stores to its competitors and with those six stores continued to survive mostly in the Bryan-College Station market until ultimately they were closed or sold off even heading into the late 2000s.

A mostly-complete listing of AppleTree stores can be found here (created by me).

Randalls/Tom Thumb
Randall's began with two pre-existing grocery stores in 1966 in Houston, and the chain grew to 42 stores by 1990. Randall's tended to be more upmarket but didn't sell beer or wine due to religious reasons by the founders. It was known as being a top-notch grocery store but still competitive with prices.

In the mid-1990s, Randalls started to change. They acquired the Cullum Companies, which owned Tom Thumb in Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin, another upscale-leaning chain similar to Randalls, and also the Simon David chain, which Tom Thumb had owned. Additionally, the apostrophe was dropped at this time.

Randalls rebranded the Tom Thumb stores in the Austin market and also picked up the Austin AppleTree stores in relatively short order. They began to sell beer and wine due to this discrepancy in 1994 in the acquired AppleTree and Tom Thumb stores.

Unfortunately, due to the buyout, Randalls started to have financial problems, selling first to KKR in 1997. By this point, Randalls was closing as many stores as it opened. Two years later, KKR flipped ownership to Safeway, which quickly changed Randalls and Tom Thumb to their format, which confused and disappointed shoppers as quality went down and price increased.

Despite this, Safeway would continue to open new stores into the early 2000s. They continued to build new stores in the suburbs. A new store opened in 2002 in the gentrifying Midtown district, about two blocks away from downtown. However, in 2005, a number of Randalls stores were closed as Safeway initiated the "Lifestyle" store renovations. As Randalls ceased opening any new stores and would close them in the next decade, industry insiders predicted that Randalls would pull out of Houston.

The Dallas and Austin stores weren't doing too better either. During this time as well, Safeway would pull the plug on Simon David, an upscale store owned by Tom Thumb, and convert that to a Tom Thumb as well.

In 2014, Safeway would be sold to AB Acquisition LLC.

Albertsons
The first signs of Albertsons were in the early 1970s, with a partnership opening "Skaggs Albertsons" food and drug stores across the South. By 1979, the partnership had dissolved with the stores being renamed Skaggs Alpha Beta, but Albertsons started to emerge in the early 1980s in Central Texas.

Albertsons took back the old Skaggs Albertsons stores, which had briefly operated as Jewel-Osco (oddly enough) ever so briefly. Like wildfire, Albertsons spread across Texas, opening Dallas stores in 1985 to entering Houston in 1995 (though it seems to have started in Central Texas in the early 1980s).

Despite entering with low prices, Albertsons ended up being one of the most expensive "mainstream" supermarkets, which would culminate in them being chased out of markets. Houston and San Antonio markets would close entirely in 2002, 43 stores in Houston alone, and leaving San Antonio's market to H-E-B (though lease restrictions made it so that the Albertsons in S.A. didn't become grocery stores).

Following the breakup of Albertsons in 2006, the newly formed Albertsons LLC (owned by Cerberus) would continue to close even more stores, all but pulling out of Central Texas (Austin, Waco).

In 2011, Albertsons would shed three more stores, three that had been in markets that weren't closed in the years that followed and miles away from the Dallas area. However, the company seemed to be recovering. The bleeding had stopped, and while tremendous ground had been lost in Dallas (mostly losing out to Walmart Neighborhood Market), they were reopening stores in the Baton Rouge area.

In 2013, the parent company of Albertsons LLC, AB Acquisition LLC, owned itself by Cerberus, acquired New Albertsons Inc., the other half of Albertsons, previously run by SuperValu, putting the Albertsons "family" back together again.

United Supermarkets
United Supermarkets LLC is a new chapter to the Albertsons story. The first "United Cash Store" opened in 1916 in Oklahoma, but the Oklahoma stores are of a different chain. United operates several different formats.

United operates in Dallas-Fort Worth and north Texas. It was acquired by Albertsons in late 2013.