Tuesday Morning has recently announced a bankruptcy which of course includes a store closing that has multiple Houston area locations on the list. Today we’re looking at 5442 Weslayan, which has an interesting lineage beyond being Houston’s oldest operating Tuesday Morning. This Tuesday Morning originally opened in 1989, a bit late compared to the first Houston area locations, which opened in 1975, only a year after the chain was established in Dallas. Tuesday Morning’s earliest stores were like this example, small cutouts of subdivided space. The store space at this location was originally the back end of a W.T. Grant location. Grants was the anchor at this end and Weingarten’s at the other. The site had initially been slated to be developed by Victor Gruen as America’s first indoor mall; however, this wouldn’t come to pass. W.T. Grant would close this locaiton prior ot their bankruptcy, to convert into a regional office for their ill-fated credit department. It seems that around this time, the Tuesday Morning space was created in the subdivision of the office space. The rest of the store would serve multiple purposes, such as an auction house and music store until finally settling on Petco in 1996.
I would expect Microcenter to attract shoppers since after Frys closure it is the only insdie the loop store with a good selection of electronics parts and computers. The former location had also a good TV dept.
But I find myself buying from Amazon rather than timing my microcenter visit to avoid traffic. I agree a traffic light would help, as would exits to the Westpark service road as well as to the east through that warehouse area. And South Rice really needs to be widened. But I don’t feel any of these improvements are close to happening.
This Tuesday Morning certainly comes from the era in which Tuesday Morning put their stores in some of the oddest, hardest to find locations in major shopping centers. This location certainly fits that description! I remember the Jersey Village Tuesday Morning which had a location in a rather hard to spot location within that shopping center (the old Randall’s/Handy Dan/Eckerd/Cinema 6 shopping center at Jones & 290). Even then, that location wasn’t as bad as this Weslayan one.
I know things are different with most of Tuesday Morning’s more modern locations, but with the older ones at least, they took the opposite approach that most retailers took in that Tuesday Morning seemed to try to find some of the worst possible locations. That, combined with some of their marketing at the time kind of made it seem that Tuesday Morning was some kind of secret club that only the well-informed cheapskates knew about, lol. It also helped hide Tuesday Morning shoppers from the rest of society such that a Foley’s or Joske’s shopper would not be so easily spotted shopping at a closeouts store. Of course, these armpit locations within shopping centers probably did help keep costs down.
We drove by for years without noticing the backside Tuesday store. The front side of the building facing Weslayan, and the center across the street, are also styled to make it hard to see what different stores are there. Something to do with West U bldg codes, or is this in COH?
As far as vehicle access goes, these two shopping areas are almost as inconvenient to enter and leave as my least favorite, the Microcenter-walmart-samsclub complex on South Rice. Does not seem to bother a lot of other people however as the parking is often full.
I really dislike the new MicroCenter location as compared to the old one on the West Loop for a few different reasons, but the bargains and good service at MicroCenter keep people coming back. My recent shopping experience there on a weekend reminded me of the glory days of Fry’s Electronics in Houston back in the early 2000s. The store was crammed with shoppers. Fry’s also purposely made it difficult to get in and out of their parking lots even if their stores, at least Greenspoint and NASA, were otherwise conveniently located along a freeway. MicroCenter’s access issues are a bit different since it’s just in a poorly located spot. A stop light located between Walmart and MicroCenter would help a lot.
The entire complex is actually COH, West U forms a bubble around it. That being said, I agree about the signage being hard to read. The East side of the Center has the problem that it’s a massive old Woolco, and to fit that lot had to be built diagonally from the street. The West side used to have larger signs, but they updated them when they redid the facade to look more like the East Side adding lots of stucco features. I think vehicle access is not nearly as bad as Micro Center/Walmart/Sam’s. Although, I worked a couple of jobs at the Weslayan Center in college and learned the tricks to dealing with traffic there.
Was the Woolco replaced (late 70’s-early 80’s) replaced by a discount price clothes store?
I think you’re talking about J. Brannam, which was actually operated by Woolworths. The idea was to subdivide the Woolco spaces, which were proving to be too big, and operate a portion as J. Brannam. That Woolco closed in 1983 with the rest of the chain in 1983, but it was subdivided around 1979/1980 for J Brannam, which outlived Woolco closing around 1985.