Houston Historic Retail

With this location closing, Randalls will be down to 13 stores in the Houston area. The Randalls at 5161 San Felipe St, Houston, TX 77056, will close its doors around April 18th, which Albertsons confirmed to the media yesterday. The information provided indicates difficulty renewing the lease as the reason for closing the store. The store, which opened in 1996 as #67, was the final location to open under Onstead ownership. The store represented the …

In case you haven’t heard the news, Alamo Drafthouse unexpectedly closed its remaining Houston location last week. The theater, which opened in 2018 in La Centerra, was our newest Alamo Drafthouse, but it certainly wasn’t our first. Alamo Drafthouse has a storied history with Houston. Years of plans to take over our market never materialized, and in the end, it seems that Houston may have been just a bit too much for the theater to …

E-commerce giant Vevor is expected to open its first U.S. flagship store sometime this week. The company is best known for white-labeling home improvement, kitchen, and gardening tools under the Vevor brand. Meaning Vevor doesn’t manufacture products directly; instead, it contracts with existing factories to produce them. Vevor’s business model to date has been exclusively online, through third parties such as Home Depot and Amazon. According to a representative at the new Vevor store in …

Houston’s owned burger chain, Beck’s Prime, is winding down operations at its Westchase location this weekend. Beck’s Prime has been in business since 1985, and opened its Westchase location along Westheimer near Wilcrest in 1991. Little has changed about how Beck’s operates over the years. The chain never stopped grinding its own burger meat or slicing its own potatoes, even as competitors abandoned these practices in favor of cheaper options. While Beck’s Prime hasn’t changed, …

Howdy folks, and welcome back to HHR. Today, we’re taking a look at a Remarkable store in Austin, or at least a store that was once Remarkable. We’re checking out 1700 W Parmer Lane, Austin, TX 78727, a former Randalls with a unique history, so let’s start with that! This store started life as one of the last new Randalls ever built. While it’s not the final Randalls store, it was built at the end …

Austin-based fast-casual taco chain Torchy’s will close its Stafford location at the start of next month. The restaurant opened in late 2021 as part of The Grid mixed-use facility. The shutdown is part of a broader move in which six other locations outside Texas were also closed. While it may seem like tacos are a passing phase, this move appears to be more about correcting overbuilding following a major investment in 2020. The Stafford location …

Houston’s newest Barnes & Noble opens today at 435 S Fry Rd, Katy, TX 77450. The new bookstore takes the place of a Party City, which closed last year during the chain’s bankruptcy. This new location is the next step in a bookstore-building boom in the Bayou City that began late last year. So far, Barnes & Noble has opened two of its three new planned stores, and Books-A-Million has scaled back from three to …

HEB’s discount banner, Joe V’s Smart Shop, has begun construction on its newest store in the Houston area, in Humble. The new grocery store will be located at 19611 US-59, Humble, TX 77338, most recently a Conn’s HomePlus location. HEB filed permits for the new store in September of last year, months after HKA Texas first reported that a Joe V’s was potentially on the way. While Joe V’s has yet to make any official …

Local women’s clothing and accessory retailer Francesca’s started down a path that eventually led to the wind-down of operations, according to just about everyone except the company itself, last week. Francesca’s has had a rough go of things for about a decade now. Beginning in 2016, a sales slump and store closings that eventually led to bankruptcy in 2020 left the retailer fighting for survival at the start of the pandemic. After emerging from bankruptcy, …

Vevor, an e-commerce giant in the home improvement sector, has chosen Houston as the location of its first company-owned flagship store. Located at 10951 FM 1960, Houston, TX 77065, the new store will replace a vacated Big Lots. Vevor has sold most of its items on various online platforms and, more recently, through brick-and-mortar retailers such as Home Depot. Vevor sells a range of white-label equipment (power tools, hardware, landscaping equipment, etc.) under its own …