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 …
Read moreCategory: Drug Stores
Now & Taking Forever, who’s behind the new Walgreen’s Gas Station on Highway 6?
Update 7/17/22: Over 2 weeks later, I realized that a draft version of this was published, well the full thing is here now! Anyone whose driven near West Oaks Mall recently has probably seen the work being done to a former Walgreens building at the corner of Westheimer and Highway 6. If you’ve been following this blog for a while you may have seen the building before. We checked it out in 2019 as a …
Read more
Headline News: Houston’s newest CVS moves into old Houston Post Building!
Houstonians of a certain age, remember when the city had more than one daily newspaper. Up until 1995, The Houston Post was the Chronicle’s last direct competitor before being dismantled as part of the slow decline of print media. It was often a dividing line to declare yourself as a Chronicle family or a Post family. The Post was considered to be more conservative, and the Chronicle more progressive, a division that went all the …
Read more
A Tour of Tomball Retail in 2000 and 1965
Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a guest submission from HHR’s good friend Anonymous in Houston Loyal Houston Historic Retail readers may recall that a few weeks ago, we published a blog post showing screenshots from a YouTube video published by Dan Starr and filmed by his wife Amy that showed Tomball’s retail scene in the year 1998. Well, Dan has come through once again as he recently uploaded some video footage taken by Amy and …
Read more
A Tour of Tomball Retail in 1998
Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a guest submission from HHR’s good friend Anonymous in Houston Tomball might seem like just another Houston suburb today, but nearly a quarter of a century ago in 1998, Tomball was a bit of a distant place to visit even for those of us like myself who lived in the Northwest Houston suburbs in the Willowbrook Mall area. That said, I did visit Tomball quite frequently in the 1990s and …
Read more
Rising water might scare Walgreens, but Dollar Tree doesn’t seem to mind
Howdy folks, and welcome back to HHR! Today, we’re heading back to a familiar topic: drugstores in Houston. Recently we took a look at a couple of “Speckerd’s” locations, and a Walgreens now selling Skechers. However, today’s former pharmacy falls into a slightly different category. This is a Walgreens that didn’t just close without a replacement, but rather this store relocated nearby. While I don’t have anything to explicitly back this up, the proximity to …
Read more
Blue Ridge Blight, a 42 year old Kroger only open for 7, finally has a promising new future
Fort Bend County is not an area one generally associates with urban blight. Most folk’s exposure to the county is driving along the highways, which mostly pass through relatively affluent areas. While there are some pockets, of less valuable properties, it’s nothing compared with what you might see driving the highways of Houston. To most, it would seem that truly decrepit areas don’t exist within the boundaries of Fort Bend, but this is far from …
Read more
Speckerd’s Part Two, Fun Size Bottles
Howdy folks, and Happy New Year’s Eve! In celebration of what you’ll likely be doing tonight, let’s take a look at a place where you can pop-corks. Houston’s, most prominent liquor store chain, Spec’s. We will again be taking a look at a Spec’s that is housed in a former Eckerd, making this part two of Speckerd’s! In our last episode, we discussed how overbuilding in Houston hurt area drug stores, leading to some stores …
Read more
A “Sketchy” former Walgreens, where you can only get shoes!
Howdy folks, and welcome back to HHR. Today we’re again tackling our overcrowding of drug stores, a topic we’ve covered once before, and will come up again in a second part. However, today we’re not checking out an Eckerd but rather a Walgreens! As mentioned previously, Walgreen’s building campaign really began as a response to the entry of CVS into the Houston market. Both Walgreens and Eckerd had steady growth in Houston during 90s and …
Read more
SpEckerd either way you’ve gotta show ID to buy stuff!
Houston has a preponderance of former drug stores. Many have found new uses, and seemingly just as many continue to sit vacant. The vast majority of these failed pharmacies come from overbuilding over the past 20 or so years. The issue wasn’t specific to Houston, as evident by the recently announced CVS closures, but it sure had an early start here. Most of it began around 2003 when CVS entered the Houston market, their desire …
Read more
Recent Comments