Category: Kroger

4000 Polk, Houston’s 90+ year old Henke & Pillot Kroger location

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This image shows how much natural light makes it into the store through the Greenhouse. These are certainly much brighter stores via natural light than most modern supermarkets. This view also provides another look at the vending machine area. We can also see the customer service desk at the front of the store. We’ll get a closer look at the customer service desk later in the tour.

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a guest submission from HHR’s good friend Anonymous in Houston with the photos taken by Mike Welcome to the latest installment of The Year of Kroger here at Houston Historic Retail! After three consecutive months of looking at early examples of Kroger Signature stores, this month’s The Year of Kroger post will take us to a Kroger that is the opposite of a Signature store. Those who have read the previous installments of The Year of Kroger, especially the one about the Texas City Kroger last month, will surely be aware of Kroger’s long history …

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The Texas City Kroger’s Golden Anniversary

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From the outside at least, it would be hard for one to guess that this supermarket is 50 years old!

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a guest submission from HHR’s good friend Anonymous in Houston with the photos taken by Mike This month’s installment of The Year of Kroger will be an anniversary celebration. 2023 is the 140th anniversary of the formation of Kroger, but that isn’t the Kroger anniversary we will be celebrating in this post. Instead, we will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Texas City Kroger located at 3541 Palmer Hwy, Texas City, TX 77590. Those who have been following HHR recently will know that Texas City retail, and Galveston County retail as a whole, has …

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Powerful Kroger Signature Stores Gain A Power Alley

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Here’s another look at the power alley, but this time we see the Bakery as well. Note that even with the compact installation of Bountiful, the power alley does still have some of Bountiful’s ‘basket’ signs. Also note the checkerboard flooring tiles. Some of those bakery display carts would have been replaced with tables and chairs back when this store was new and still had the fast food food court.

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a guest submission from HHR’s good friend Anonymous in Houston with the photos taken by Mike In last month’s The Year of Kroger entry, we explored a very early Kroger Signature store built in 1993, the Cypress Station store. In this month’s The Year of Kroger post, we will explore another early Kroger Signature store, Kroger HO-311, the Jersey Village/Steeplechase store located at the intersection of Jones Road & West Road in the northwest suburbs of Houston. While the 1993 and 1994 Kroger Signature stores have more in common than they are different, we will …

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A Sign of the Future: Kroger’s Dominating Signature Format Turns 30

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By 1993’s standards, this would have seemed like a very large supermarket!

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a guest submission from HHR’s good friend Anonymous in Houston with the photos taken by Mike In last month’s The Year of Kroger installment, we took a look at a north Houston suburban Kroger, the Kroger on Veterans Memorial. This month’s installment of The Year of Kroger will keep us in the north Houston suburbs and the general FM 1960 corridor. In this edition of The Year of Kroger, we will take a look at the Kroger Signature format and how it enabled Kroger to dominate the Houston market in the late 1990s and 2000s …

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A Warm Greenhouse Welcome to the Year of Kroger here at HHR!

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Here is a more distant view of the store. As one can see here, this store does do a fair amount of business. One can also tell from here that the parking lot is not in the best condition these days.

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a guest submission from HHR’s good friend Anonymous in Houston with the photos taken by Mike Happy New Year and welcome to 2023, Houston Historic Retail readers! We have many interesting things planned for this year. One of our goals for the year is to cover some of the most interesting Kroger stores in the Houston area. With that in mind, we plan on posting one Kroger post a month in 2023 in order show Kroger’s significant influence in Houston’s retail history. Today’s Year of Kroger post takes us to a surviving Houston Greenhouse Kroger …

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Return to Krogerstons Express, aka Kwik Stop’s lost cousin!

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Howdy folks, and welcome back to Houston Historic Retail! Today we’re taking a look at a Krogerstons Express! For those unaware, a Krogerstons, is a Kroger in a former Albertsons, which we have plenty of in the Houston area. While Albertsons did re-enter some former store spaces when purchasing Safeway (including Randall’s), they stand to reenter a large number of former stores depending on the outcome of their planned merger. When Albertsons exited Houston in 2002, they left behind plenty of modern and up-to-date stores. Their issue was not necessarily low sales but rather over-expansion. With the odds stacked against …

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The Kroger-Albertsons Merger, and what it could mean for Houston

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Howdy folks, and welcome back to Houston Historic Retail. Today we’ll be discussing the Kroger and Albertsons merger/buyout announced last week and what it could mean for Houston. So I’m not accused of burying the lead here, the short answer is we don’t know the exact impact yet. The long answer, however, is we know enough that we can make some predictions. For those out of the loop, Kroger has officially agreed to acquire Albertsons for $24.6 Billion. In Houston, Albertsons is represented by Randall’s, which was acquired along with the rest of Safeway back in 2015. Kroger, on the …

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Weingarten’s lives on through Kroger in the Heights!

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This signage is all new, but permits have likely not changed since Safeway who used this separated non-lighted style

Weingarten’s was a grocer I never knew, and if I had to take a guess, it’s a store most of my readers never knew either. Even though Weingarten’s was long gone by the time I was around, the name was still eponymous for a grocery store in Houston. As well, despite a less than stellar exit, the opinion most Houstonians held of Weingarten’s was still overwhelmingly positive, with most chalking up those final years to poor out-of-state leadership. This was in large part thanks to Weingarten ‘keeping up’ with their stores during their tenure. With property development at heart, the …

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A Tour of Tomball Retail in 1998

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Welcome To Tomball! (Captured with permission from Dan Starr)

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 through the turn of the Millennium period. Given that, what a surprise it was recently when I came across a video on YouTube posted by …

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Fuddruckers goes Krogering, Trying out Kroger’s new ghost kitchen

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The Kitchen United store front took up far more space than I thought it would.

Howdy folks, and welcome back to Houston Historic Retail! When I started out this blog, I had one intention, I wanted to cover retail-focused content about my fair Bayou-City. This blog actually started all the way back in 2015. One thing I never had intentions of doing was becoming a food critic. I don’t have the palate or the expressive vocabulary needed to accomplish this I like fast food and small words. That being said, today we’re doing a restaurant review well sort of, I’d struggle to call today’s topic a true restaurant as it’s not even in the name. …

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