Tag: Arlan’s Markets

Big Chief lives on as Arlan’s in Santa Fe!

Howdy folks, and welcome back to Houston Historic Retail. Today we’re heading back down Highway 6 to the small town of Santa Fe. You may remember our last stop focused on a former Minimax that HEB had purchased and continues to run essentially as a Pantry Foods store, lacking service departments. This Arlan’s nee Big Chief we’re looking at today is actually a larger store than HEB, and more importantly, features service departments (deli, bakery, and floral). Let us get started by talking about the history of this store. The Arlan’s designation is relatively recent, with this location being bought …

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Arlan’s a modern take on the Traditional Independent

Thank you for having me!

Howdy folks, and welcome back to Houston Historic Retail! It’s been a while since we have done a grocery (2 weeks in fact!) store post, so make sure you’re buckled up for this one! We’re taking a deviation to the South of Houston to find out about one of Houston’s most respected independent grocers, Arlan’s Market. Now, if you’ve been around HHR for any length of time, you’ll know that overall I like independents. In the realm of the blog, I tend to focus on Food Town and Foodarama as they’re arguably the most present independent operators supermarkets in Houston, …

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Lake Jackson just can’t keep a dang grocery store!

Believe it or not, the Food and Drugs signs are likely original from Safeway, although they would have been red.

My heart always drops a little bit when I hear about a former Safeway shutting down for good. It’s amazing that stores built in the 1970s are still operating as grocery stores, that’s the equivalence of someone in the 2000s shopping at a store that opened in 1950, not impossible but largely unheard as by that point the supermarkets that had been built would be outsized in only a few years. The Lake Jackson Safeway has a somewhat complicated history, or multiple operators having either short bursts of success or measurable failures. Some of this may have to do with …

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