Howdy, folks, and welcome back to HHR. Today, we’re taking a look at an interesting Fiesta. This location at 20331 FM 529, Cypress, TX 77433, was the final location to open with any direct input from much of the original staff. This store opened in January 2015 and was one of the last moves from Grocers Supply Co. before Fiesta was sold to an investment firm later that year. This location was an odd duck when it opened. It used a custom logo that was only ever featured in two other locations. This logo may be some more substantial evidence that this store was designed to be a more “middle of the road” location than Fiesta stores. For some context, in 2013, after Gerlands and Fiesta ended up under common ownership, a plan was hatched to reopen the Gerlands in Sugar Creek as a “Fiesta Market Place.” This store was meant to appeal to a general audience swaying from the International store image that Fiesta had cultivated over the previous 40 years. The experiment was ambitious but ultimately deemed a failure, with Fiesta shutting it down only months after this location opened. While the exterior logo has been updated during a recent “unification” of logos by current owner Chedraui, much of the original decor package remains, pointing to similar Market Place origins. The third store to use the logo, the location in Conroe, has also been rebranded. Also, until rebranding as Uno Mas in 2023, the adjacent Fiesta Beverage Mart used a slightly custom name, “Fiesta Liquors,” and maintained an original matching logo.
As of 2024, this remains one of the standout Fiesta locations; while it has some traditional Fiesta elements, the exterior design is visually reminiscent of a Gerlands, and the interior decor, product selection, and general atmosphere present this store as a more mainline grocer. This store also represents the end of an era for Fiesta. The number of local executives would severely drop after GSC’s sale of Fiesta in preparation for selling their own wholesale business. To the best of my knowledge, Fiesta has always been allowed to maintain some local offices. Still, it has shrunk considerably from having its own building to a few regional managers in a portion of an office tower. After these sales, Fiesta would also stop opening new stores. They would rebrand a few competitors due to a lawsuit by La Michoacana, but even this would fall short of their original goal. Fiesta would be passed around until ending up under Chedraui’s U.S. operations in 2018. The Mexican-based owners would finally open a new Fiesta this summer, making for the first genuinely new store since this Cypress location. Over the years, Fiesta has had quite the assortment of oddball locations, from tiny old Weingarten’s, to full-sized Hypermarkets with Hydroponic gardens. While many of the more unique locations have closed over the years, this vestige of a failed path for Fiesta still remains.
I’ve been to this Fiesta Mart a couple of times. For those of us who are used to suburban Fiesta stores looking something like Fiesta Mart #20 over by Willowchase, especially before it was renovated, the store in Cypress is a major disappointment. It certainly doesn’t look as nice as what the Sugar Land Fiesta Market Place looked like during the brief time it was around. The Cypress store is very much a warehouse-look store, even though it is otherwise a fairly standard supermarket. It has all the visual appeal of an HEB, newer Kroger, or Home Depot. This is to say it has no visual appeal at all.
I realize that the people who live out that way really don’t have many (any?) alternatives but to shop at stores which look like a warehouse unless maybe someone lives near the Randalbertsons on Barker Cypress & Clay. So, with that in mind, maybe this store isn’t so bad, relative to the local competition, but I’m fortunate that we have more visually appealing options closer to where I am on the NW side.