Howdy, or Xin Chao, and welcome back to Houston Historic Retail! Today we’re visiting a Vietnamese Grocer in a nearly perfectly preserved former Venture/Kmart. In July 1995, the building at 8300 W Sam Houston Pkwy S, Houston, TX 77072 would open as Venture Store #141. Making it one of the last Texas locations and the final planned Houston area store. Although Sugar Land would open a few months later, plans for that store came first. Just days prior to the grand opening, Venture had announced a repositioning of the company to be more value-oriented and drop their higher-end merchandise. For …
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Random Retail: An old Spaghetti Warehouse Reappears, Kmart Foods Depot, and Hartz’s Neon Extravaganza
Howdy folks, and welcome back to Houston HIstoric Retail! Today we’ll be taking a break from the norm for some Random Retail! In case you’re new here, not every photo I take is part of a post. However, I visit lots of places I visit are worth sharing but not enough to cover on their own. So today, we’re checking out a former Kmart turned Restuanrat Depot, a former Spaghetti Warehouse showing off its old colors, and finally ‘celebrating’ the return of Hartz’s buffet! So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride, or tense up and lay flat… I don’t …
Keep readingRetail News: Burlington moving into two former Best Buy locations
Your best buys are always at Burlington, may not be the new slogan painted above the door, but it would be apt. Off-price retailer Burlington (Coat Factory) has recently made moves on two former Best Buy properties in the Houston area. The stores at 13238 Northwest Fwy, Houston, TX 77040 and 24230 Commercial Dr. Rosenberg, TX 77470 closed in 2021 and 2022, respectively, both part of a larger restructuring Best Buy has undertaken over the past two years. The 290 location is likely meant to make up for the closure of a longstanding location at 12005 Northwest Fwy, Houston, TX …
Keep readingVintage Ads: Finding Bargains at North Oaks Mall and Elsewhere in 1989
Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a guest submission from HHR’s good friend Anonymous in Houston Longtime readers here at Houston Historic Retail might remember our Vintage Ads series of posts. It’s been a while since we’ve posted a new Vintage Ads post so it seems like a good time to make a new installment in the series. This installment of the series will look at retail ads from the August 16, 1989 issue of the Houston Chronicle. The thumbnail images included in the post might be too small to read, but simply click on the links below the images to …
Keep readingVintage Texas Retail Videos in 1080p from the Jones Film Collection
Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a guest submission from HHR’s good friend Anonymous in Houston Those who have been reading Houston Historic Retail for some period of time know that I did a two-part series (Part I and II) in early 2021 about the excellent retail videos available at The Portal of Texas History website operated by the University of North Texas Library. Most of the videos at The Portal were supplied by Dallas-Fort Worth TV station KXAS-TV. Well, another Dallas Metroplex university library, the Southern Methodist University Library, also has a collection of videos in their G. William Jones …
Keep readingWeingarten Realty’s Annual Reports, a look into our not so distant retail past
Howdy folks, how many times have you encountered the word “Weingarten” in your life. If you’re a native Houstonian, then you probably know the name, to say the least. Houstonians of a certain era, will obviously remember the J. Weingarten grocery store chain. One of Houston’s first true supermarkets, starting out in the 1930s, Weingartens experienced an explosive growth post World War II. The family, who had initially only built freestanding grocery stores, quickly jumped on the property development bandwagon. By the 1960s the Weingarten Realty Corp was operating grocery stores in Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, along with the shopping …
Keep readingSafeway, Walgreens, and Kmart One of West Houston’s best preserved shopping centers
Howdy folks, and welcome back! It should be no secret by now, that I have a bit of an obsession with Safeway/AppleTree. While I don’t really remember Safeway’s presence in Houston, I do have lots of distinct memories of AppleTree. In learning about AppleTree, I’ve also learned lots about Safeway. One fact, I didn’t originally know, was that most Safeways in Houston were built with an adjacent Eckerd location. It seems that the deal allowed Safeway to have a strong smaller tenant as a guaranteed neighbor, and as a bonus early Safeway locations weren’t built with pharmacies, so Eckerd would …
Keep readingDigging through the Photo Box: 1980s Houston Retail On Vintage Aerial
Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a guest submission from HHR’s good friend Anonymous in Houston Every so often, someone in the retail enthusiast community will stumble upon great sources of retail history in unlikely or hidden corners of the Internet. Loyal Houston Historic Retail readers will know that in just the last few months, we’ve managed to find a large repository of retail news videos clips at The Portal to Texas History website and we also found a large collection of retail annual reports at the Internet Archive. Friend of the HHR blog and fellow retail blogger South Texas Retail …
Keep readingThere’s a dead mall in Stafford you probably didn’t know about
Howdy folks and welcome back, we seem to be getting to a great diehard core of readers here, and I’m really happy about that! I want to take a moment to thank the folks who keep coming back to read and share my content. Please keep reading, sharing, and commenting, that’s what keeps me going! Moving on to today’s topic, I’ll warn you up front, this is NO HIDDEN GEM, this is not a mall that has been open for years, and is now slowly finally dying off. This is a failed experiment and meets the bare minimum of what …
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