Howdy folks, and welcome back to HHR. Today, we’re taking a look at a farce, a fraud, a mediocre photographic fakery, if you will. So what are we looking at? A “grand re-opening” of the Kroger at 1035 N Shepherd Dr, Houston, TX 77008. To start, this has always been a significant store for Kroger. Starting with a bit of history, this store initially opened as a Henke & Pillot location all the way back in 1955. While it’s not the longest-lasting Kroger-owned store in Houston, with that honor going to 4000 Polk, it’s undoubtedly a store that has stood the test of time. Over the years, the store has grown significantly. It has also been a test bed for various Kroger concepts over the years. Its location within the Heights provided a great test bed for “urban suburbanites.” The store was an early conversion to the Signature concept and has been expanded again since. While not exactly Marketplace sized, the store has used its extra size to experiment with options like the “Kro-Bar” and, most recently, a ghost kitchen concept. The winning idea seemed to be the ghost kitchen until the operator behind the concept went bankrupt about a year ago. The ghost kitchen sat vacant for the better part of a year, with the branding still up for a while. When I first heard about this grand reopening, I figured it had to do with removing the space.
As you can see from the photos, I was at least half right. A tiny end portion of the ghost kitchen has been removed, but the rest of the area has been repurposed as prep kitchens. The Sushi Contractor seems to be the only food service left in that portion of the building, but even then, it seems like overkill for what they do there. The fruit slicing and juicing station also does not seem to need as much as it was given, and the chocolate-dipped strawberries were likely made in the bakery, as nothing behind the counter was obviously set up for food prep. The Artisan decor does look nice, and the baby blue bakery is quite striking, but to call this a grand re-opening is a bit of a stretch. Kroger has been hyping up store refreshes like the “Hispanic Kroger” about a year ago and seems to be giving similar treatment to its two planned “Asian Kroger” stores in DFW. While these “format flips” are slightly more befitting of a grand reopening banner, the reality is that Kroger has not opened a new store in the Houston market since 2018. With their hands tied in the much more intense DFW grocery wars. Houston, as usual in these matters, takes second place.
The most interesting thing here, aside from the bakery shrink charts (a most unusual Kroger decor feature, lol) and the blue oval Kroger logo with a spoon cart, are the powder blue bakery refrigerated cases. Otherwise, it is just another example of a dull-looking store carrying Kroger Artisan decor, like what we saw at the N. Eldridge & FM 1960 Krogertsons. Unlike the Krogertsons, this store was already ugly to begin with given the warehouse look with the open ceiling and concrete floors, so it ends up looking worse than the Krogertsons even though, in many ways, this is a more deluxe installation of Artisan as compared to the one made to fit an Albertsons Grocery Palace store.
But, hey, at least we have those bakery shrink charts! I wonder what’s up with the bakery shrink at the W. 20th Krogweinway?