Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a guest submission from Pseduo3d of Carbon-izer.com. It examines the grocery stores in the heart of Kingwood, specifically the three supermarkets at West Lake Houston Parkway and Kingwood Drive.
Holiday Foods / Albertsons / H-E-B v1
The first grocery store built at this intersection was Holiday Foods (4303 Kingwood), which anchored the Kings Crossing shopping center. It opened in April 1985 as a 45,000-square-foot store. Less than a year prior, some Minimax owners, tired of Fleming, formed their own independent grocery store chain, Holiday Foods. While I don’t know what the Kingwood Holiday Foods store looked like, it likely looked almost identical to this store spread out over a larger footprint.
Holiday Foods would operate for the next decade (even as a massive Randalls opened in 1992 across the intersection), outliving all the other locations of the chain. In 1995, the owners, Frank & Sam Glass, announced they were switching to IGA as their supplier and, within a few months, were kicked out of the store. Fleming, which owned the building, likely had a contract that required their tenants to be supplied by them. Once Fleming took control of the store, they quickly liquidated it. Over the next two years, the building would sit vacant, with Albertsons picking it up at some point. In 1997, it was demolished, along with the Eckerd next door, to allow for a new Albertsons store to be built. The new store was a much larger, fancier supermarket on the site of the old store. The modern 60,000-square-foot Albertsons opened in January 2001. It’s unsure what caused the long delay between purchase and grand opening.
About a year and a half later, Albertsons closed down when the chain left Houston. H-E-B was expanding in the same area, picked it up, and reopened it as one of their own in 2003. This reused facade helped to make the store one of the best-looking H-E-B exteriors in the entire chain, in my opinion. However, this original store was abandoned in 2016 when H-E-B was relocated to the northeast side of the intersection. The location continues to sit vacant, much like after Holiday Foods left.
RANDALLS
The second supermarket to open at the intersection sat catty-corner to Kings Crossing, a Randalls at 4540 Kingwood that opened in 1992 with a shopping center around it and a “New Generation” store at around 66,000 square feet. The Randalls did well initially and seemingly won its battles against Holiday Foods and Albertsons, but then came H-E-B. It was probably more the failure of Randalls’ parent company, Safeway, rather than H-E-B’s success, but as time went on, the crowds began to thin.
In 2016, H-E-B tore down the Kings Crossing Apartments across from Randalls for an even larger store and strip center. Randalls’ last hurrah came in September 2017 when it managed to reopen its store before H-E-B could open theirs (H-E-B was more heavily flooded than Randalls was) with some salvaged checkout stands and inexpensive décor. However, once H-E-B reopened, things returned to their status quo, and Randalls shut down in January 2020. In July 2022, half of the store reopened as K&M Ace Hardware.
H-E-B v2
In 1982, Kings Crossing Apartments opened, an upscale apartment complex on 32 acres with amenities, including a stocked pond and hiking trails. By the 2000s and 2010s, Kings Crossing had a bad reputation and was to be redeveloped into a commercial site. “The new Main Street Kingwood will be located on a 33-acre site that was home to the former Kings Crossing apartment complex, 4545 Kingwood Drive, for many years was an eyesore and a magnet for criminal activity in Kingwood,” the article was quoted as saying.
While it featured several fast-food restaurants and other strip mall stores, the show’s star was a 105,000-square-foot H-E-B, which opened in October 2016. In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey flooded the store more severely than Randalls. With ten feet of floodwater inside, the H-E-B did not reopen until January 2018, but once it did, it was finally able to vanquish Randalls for good. Leaving what used to be a competitive corner, with only one grocery option.
Good to see you guys in my neck of the woods. I haved lived in or near Kingwood for about 33 years of my life. This area has seen a lot of grocery stores come and go. Holiday Foods, Jamails, Randall’s, Kroger, HEB, Walmart Neighborhood Market, Albertsons, Aldi, and Safeway have all done business in Kingwood over the years. The old Safeway building is part of the massive Insperity complex along Kingwood drive, Loop 494, and I-69. Stop and Go also had multiple stores in the area that were another go-to option since the area gas stations in the 80’s were tiny.
One little change to the article, the Holiday Foods was next to Walgreens. Walgreens demolished the Crafts Etc. building and built a new store at the other end of the center in either late 2000 or early 2001 that still exists today. Eckerd was in the Randall’s shopping center and became CVS. CVS operated there until 2021, when they moved to a new location on a former Chase bank site.