Sears at San Jacinto Mall opened in 1981 along with the rest of the mall. The store closed on December 9, 2018. As of this posting only 2 full size Sears in the Houston area will be open past April of 2020. North Shepherd Rd. and the Pasadena Macroplaza Mall locations. The Deerbrook and Willowbrook Mall locations are currently at the beginning of the store closing liquidation sales.
My video of the final 4 days of this store at this link https://youtu.be/bFHv-xYvoP8
September 2015
November 2015
As you can see, this store had a very nice electronics department at one point. TV's used to wrap around the whole department and there were full shelves all across this area.
Feb 2016
Take a good look at the sign in the middle, lol.
When the fountain was still on at the mall.
December 2017
March 2018
It was nice to see the We ❤ Texas sign.
Last TV for sale at this location. The electronics department here was one of the better ones just a couple of years earlier. By this time the department was down to just small items.
June 2018
Out with the old, in with the new. The store closing banner is going up in the background of this photo. This was in October 2018.
A few nights later still in October 2018.
Final 4 days, photos shot on December 6, 2018.
This was such an awesome view, now this spot is in the middle of a grassy field.
The store closed on Sunday December 9th, 2018.
Aftermath of the closing photos will be added in the future.
Demolition started on June 28, 2019 of the Sears and about 2/3 of the mall space. Mervyn's, Service Merchandise, Marshalls, also were demolished in addition to the majority of the interior mall.
Demolition photos starting in July 2019.
The store is all gone now. The fencing is down and grass has grown over the field as of February 2020. The last portion of San Jacinto Mall closed on Jan 5th, 2020 at 6pm.
Only Macy's and JCPenney remain open as of the posting of this article.
Farewell Sears at San Jacinto Mall! More San Jacinto Mall and many more updates coming soon.
The San Jacinto Mall Sears supposedly did quite well before it closed. While the Willowbrook Mall Sears, which also opened in 1981, looks to be in better shape on the outside than this store was, I dare to say that some parts of the San Jacinto Sears looked nicer than how the Willowbrook Sears looks on the inside. This may especially be true of the housewares department.
ReplyDeleteThe outside design of this store is a bit more like the old Baybrook Mall Sears than the fellow 1981 Sears at Willowbrook. It's nice to get some images of this store before it was torn down. We'll have to see if the soon to close Willowbrook and Deerbrook Mall Sears will also be demolished in the near future.
The electronics department at this Sears in around 2015 reminds me a bit of the Main St. Sears from around the same time period. The Baybrook Sears also had a bit of a similar look, but the Baybrook electronics department might have been even bigger.
Anyway, I look forward to seeing more photos of the San Jacinto Mall. It was certainly an ambitious effort and it had many of the retailers which I found very interesting in the 1980s and 1990s, but I never did make it there for a visit so I'll have to experience it through photos and written memories about the place.
There was nothing particularly special about this Sears location. It was fairly well maintained and had the latest signage. You could also say that the Sears corridor was the most lively in the mall. In the final years Marshalls/Ashley Furniture and Affordable Furniture occupied large spaces in the Sears corridor. Several inline spaces were filled as well, but the corridor was one of the better ones in the former mall.
DeleteOne thing you never experienced was the mildew/mold and bleach/chlorine odor throughout the mall. It was an odd smell mixture that was stronger near the fountains before they were shut off. I never saw the mall in its prime, but I did visit every anchor in the late 90's when we first started going there.
It is funny how sometimes we remember the smells of a mall more vividly than anything else. I remember Greenspoint Mall having somewhat of a chlorinated smell to it near the big fountains. It wasn't a strong smell, but it was something you would notice.
DeleteTo me, the mall with the most memorable smell was Memorial City Mall before it was renovated around 2003 or so. The 'old' Memorial City Mall always smelled like Froot Loops cereal to me. It was a very odd thing. I never could figure out why it smelled that way. I don't know if they used cleaners that smelled that way or if they used a fragrance that smelled like that. It's a very odd thing and I can't think of the old Memorial City Mall, which to me was the 'real' Memorial City, without thinking of that odd smell. I also think of The Floppy Wizard computer store which was at the mall for many years. The store is still around, but it's no longer at the mall. It's down Gessner a bit now.
Their website has photos of their old mall store fronts though.
Greenspoint still has that smell near the fountain.
DeleteI wish they had more photos of the old Memorial City Mall. Another mall that does not have many photos online was the Town and Country Mall. I actually went there a lot of times back in the 90's and later when the mall was dying rapidly.
There is some conflicting information. According to Google Maps, Greenspoint Mall is still open. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBfnimRyFik
DeleteThis link says it’s closed. What is real?
It is still open. The mall never closed because there are some property disputes between the owners of the anchor stores. I am sure the mall is temporarily closed for the time being for the Coronavirus restrictions. The mall was supposed to be torn down, but one of the mall anchors owners wants to do something different with their piece of the property than the majority owner wants to do. For now, the mall is barely making it.
DeleteImagine how nice West Oaks Mall would be if it never lost JCPenny, Macy’s, and Sears. This, plus it being around 80-90% occupied, the Regal Edwards Theater still separate from the mall on the west side and the west side does not have the old wing with the former Steve & Barry’s, and the businesses around the mall never left. In my opinion, the West Oaks area in general would be one of the best places to be in Houston.
DeleteWest Oaks Mall was really starting to turn a corner when the Theater opened. I have to wonder what happened to empty out the mall in the past 5 years. West Oaks is in a prime location, maybe people prefer to shop in Katy or Sugarland that live near the mall. There are plenty of good shopping options near West Oaks as well, so I can't figure out the reason why the mall is failing.
DeletePenney's never really planned on being there permanently, they never renovated the store and they did not have all of the departments that a normal JCPenney store has. You can see the difference in how JCPenney took over the former Lord and Taylor at Memorial City Mall, and completely remodeled the store to look like a JCPenney. The West Oaks JCPenney which was also in a former Lord and Taylor, had the same paint, same interior, and it never really felt like a JCPenney store.
Speaking of Sears closing stores, the McAllen Kmart is closing. It sucks because like the Sears at Willowbrook and Deerbrook, it had managed to avoid closing. I was looking at images of the Auto Center at Willowbrook and apparently, there is a 80’s/90’s looking TV in what I am assuming is the waiting area.
ReplyDeleteIn other retail news, the FM 1960 Pier 1 Imports, both the Willowbrook and the Champion Forest one are closing, according to Google Maps. Bed Bath and Beyond recently shuttered the Meyerland and West Oaks
one, while the Copperfield one is still having store closing sales.
I recently found out that the Hobby Lobby on 1960 and Jones Rd used to be a Kmart. You can tell because the ceiling looks like a classic Kmart ceiling, but there are 2 confusing things about it. First, there is no classic circular air vent on the ceiling, based on Google Maps, second, Big Lots next door has those vents, but the ceiling is higher and it used to be a Kroger.
Another weird thing is that I don’t know what was going on with the old Willowbrook Walmart. I was looking at old images of it on Foursquare and Yelp and I can’t tell what ceiling it had. I know that some Walmarts that were built in the 90’s were remodeled and a new segment was attached, with a high ceiling, like the Stafford one on I-69 and W Airport Blvd. The problem with the Willowbrook one is that I don’t know if it was one of those Walmarts with one part of the store being low, and the other part being a high ceiling, or it was just the pictures on the websites were part of the wrong Walmart.
Speaking of Willowbrook, I was looking at Google Street View near the Circuit City turned Ashley Homestore on FM 1960 and SH-249 and I saw someone walking around and looking at the former Audio Installation Bay facing 1960. I wonder what they were doing?
Another Kmart related matter. The new Texas Thrift Store on 1960 and Kuykendahl used to be a Hobby Lobby, but I recently went inside the new store and saw a classic Kmart circular air vent on the ceiling. I wonder if this was a former Kmart. A little side note, before the new thrift store opened, the label scar show these exact words: Hobby Lobby creative center. (Creative Center was lowercase on the store front.)
In-N-Out Burger is opening a Willowbrook location. I think that they should not build it there because Willowbrook is about to become the next Greenspoint, and I don’t just mean the mall, but the surrounding area too. If only the Willowbrook Sears, wouldn’t close, I think that would either stop the area getting abandoned, or it would at least slow the abandoning down.
Finally, this is a list of the malls that I wish wouldn’t have lost their stores, especially the anchors:
Willowbrook Mall: Losing Sears.
Deerbrook Mall: Losing Sears, lost Palais Royal.
West Oaks Mall: Lost Sears, Macy’s, Palais Royal, and JCPenny.
Baybrook Mall: Lost Sears.
Memorial City Mall: Lost Sears,
(My favorite malls are ones that have a Sears and Target. My dream mall would have a Sears, Target, Macy’s, Dillard’s, JCPenny, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Palais Royal.)
I will reply at a later time to this comment.
DeleteThe FM 1960 and Jones Road Kmart was my local Kmart for many years. The Hobby Lobby that is there now was indeed the old Kmart. Well, about a quarter or third of the Kmart was demolished to make room for the Walgreens that is there now. When the Kmart was open, Walgreens was across Jones Rd. in the Steeplechase shopping center which used to house Target. Hobby Lobby was in that same shopping center before moving to the old Kmart location. The former Hobby Lobby was a Best Products store (similar to a Service Merchandise) before Hobby Lobby moved in and then moved out. Anyway, the Kmart did have classic Kmart HVAC vents when it was open (it closed in 1997), but I suppose Hobby Lobby replaced them.
DeleteThe Big Lots next to Hobby Lobby was indeed a Kroger for a pretty brief period of time. It eventually became some kind of furniture store and then a Pic-N-Save. Pic-N-Save then became MacFrugal's and MacFrugal's morphed into Big Lots. Pic-N-Save, MacFrugal's, and Big Lots are/were all similar types of stores, but only Big Lots has furniture. The third major anchor in that shopping center was the hilariously named Weiner's clothing store chain which was next to the Kroger spot. I think it's a King Dollar store now.
The FM 1960 and Kuykendahl building was indeed a Kmart. I'm thinking that Kmart closed around 1994-1997, but I'm thinking it was closer to 1994 than 1997 because I think it was already closed when the FM 1960 and I-45 Kmart opened up in the ex-Venture location in 1997. Retail almost always struggled at that intersection and the Hobby Lobby was short-lived as well. The old Kmart was subdivided and part was turned into a Family Dollar and the end part was turned into a Hoffer Furniture. The Hoffer became a NAM Thrift Store for a while before they moved to a building behind that crumbling shopping center. I had no idea a new thrift store had opened up there in the old Kmart. I may have to check that out.
The Willowbrook area Wal-Mart opened as a regular non-Supercenter Walmart in the mid-1990s. It was converted into a Supercenter in 1999-2000. The grocery department had an unfinished ceiling like modern Walmarts and the rest of the store had a drop ceiling with ceiling tiles. The drop ceiling was lower than the open ceiling in the grocery department, but I wouldn't necessarily call it low. It wasn't like an old Kmart or anything like that. The old Houston Ventures, which turned into Kmarts, had a hybrid open/drop ceiling setup where the ceiling above the main corridors/'racetrack' were open and most everything else had a drop ceiling over it. Kmart retained that setup when they moved in.
Palais Royal once had a store at Willowbrook Mall. It was in the small corridor opposite from JCPenney (the same corridor where Los Cucos is now). It closed around the time when Palais Royal went from looking like a small department store to looking like a big box store around the turn of the millennium.
Sears and Target bring a lot of variety to malls that are otherwise way too oriented towards shoes/women's clothes. People say that owners of successful malls celebrate when Sears closes at their malls, but I think they'll regret that because Sears shoppers were different than the shoppers of most other mall stores. I know I'm less likely to visit the mall without Sears.
The Willowbrook area is still the retail hub for the NW Houston around the Beltway. Sears closing there has more to do with Sears' problems than the mall's problems, but I could tell this past Christmas season that the mall, like many malls, isn't bringing out the crowds like they used to. Unfortunately, there are many other retailers at and around Willowbrook which are on shaky ground right now and some of them will surely close in the next decade. Again, it won't really be the fault of the area, but rather it's reflective of the problems facing B&M retail.
It is the end of an era. The final Kmart in Texas will soon be gone.
DeleteThere is a lot to keep up with these days with all of these closings.
I wonder if the Kmart on Jones Rd. was a small location that was formerly a Grant's or something else they acquired over the years.
I want to say that the former Willowbrook Walmart had the high ceilings throughout, but I don't exactly remember. I remember the old 1960 near Hafer Rd. location had the lower ceilings.
Yes the 1960 and Kuykendahl Hobby Lobby was a Kmart. I remember specifically going there back in the 90's when the Super Kmart in Humble did not have some type of baseball cards I was looking for. Funny how I can remember that, but not what I was looking for specifically.
I visited In and Out on the Southwest side recently. It is a decent place to eat and they move the lines very rapidly. Some of the locations in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area are in troubled areas, but they can still make a lot of money even if there is nearby crime.
Deerbrook Mall filled the former Palais Royal space with a Mom and Pop type of Women's clothing store. I forgot the name of the new store. They also filled the vacant Agaci with a discount clothing store similar to the former Agaci. It is a shame that so many Sears stores are gone. The two that will be left are just shells of what they used to be. I am hoping Belk or Von Maur expand into this area. They are the only chains growing into new areas, and Belk has grown to the East, North, and West of the Houston area. One day they might make it here like Dick's Sporting Goods finally did after growing around the Houston area.
Thanks for squaring some of the Kmart location info up. I replied to some of the info about the 1960 and Kuykendahl former Kmart. You are absolutely right, retail has always struggled at that corner. There are too many better shopping centers further down 1960 or along I-45 in Spring or the Woodlands. At the time all of these centers were built, 1960 was booming. Now, nearly the whole 1960 West area is mostly declining. There are a few bright spots, but that corner is not one of them. That enormous former Fiesta shopping center has one or two businesses left. They did not even have the lights on in the parking lot there when I last went to Willowbrook Mall in February.
DeleteSpeaking of Palais Royal, did you know that Stage Stores is having money issues and may also file for bankruptcy. They are closing 200 more stores than they initially were going to. Some of the Gordmans stores like the one in Atascocita are already closing. Some are going to close instead of being converted to Gordmans. The only store left in the Northeast side of town is in Kingwood. Currently that store is still a Palais Royal in the middle of their store liquidation. It was supposed to become a Gordmans in May, but that may not happen now. The company had a disappointing holiday sales performance and now faces a cash crunch. Another area that will be hit hard is the Rio Grande Valley all 15 stores except for 1 will now close instead of convert to Gordmans. I documented one of those stores a Bealls in Brownsville at Sunrise Mall.
It is hard to find tools, appliances, or traditional electronics at any mall these days. With the exception of the Katy Mills types of indoor outlet malls, we are just out of luck at the mall. JCPenney was the only department store that seemed to want to earn some of Sears customers, but those plans died last year. Nobody even knows what JCPenney is doing these days, but that is a different story. Target has even cut back on their departments that I frequent such as electronics and sporting goods. Best Buy has a few mall locations, but none here in Houston. It is almost like brick and mortar retailers have driven away customers like us, and pushed us to the Internet.
Stage Stores does appear to be in trouble. I did not hear that latest bit of news, but I know they've been struggling in recent years. The switch to the Gordman's format makes sense, but even then there is a lot of competition in the closeout clothing sector with heavyweights like TJMaxx, Marshall's, and Ross. Even Macy's is starting to look more and more like a closeout store as the years go by. I did see some pictures of a Stage store which turned into a Gordman's recently on one of those new retail blogs I've been following. It might have been the Retail Regent blog. The transition was rather underwhelming, but I guess they don't have a choice with the cash crunch. They may have to file for bankruptcy to get out from some leases for stores they'd like to close.
DeleteThe Jones Rd. and FM 1960 Kmart was a fairly typical 'mansard slice facade' style mid-sized Kmart from the late 1970s. About the only unique thing I can think to say about it was that the K-Cafe closed in around 1990 and was never converted into a Little Caesar's Pizza Station like so many other Kmarts. The only reason I can think for that is that there were multiple other Little Caesar's stores in the area and so maybe they didn't want competition from Kmart. If that Kmart looks smaller than the typical Kmart, it's because part of it was torn down to make room for Walgreens when Hobby Lobby opened.
Speaking of that shopping center, we discussed that Big Lots earlier. I had not been to a Big Lots in a few years, but I decided to visit it after discussing it here and seeing a post about Big Lots on another retail blog. In some ways, Big Lots has changed in recent years, but in other ways it has remained basically the same. The layout of the Jones Rd. store really has not changed since the Pic-N-Save/MacFrugal's days long ago. OTOH, it seems Big Lots has moved away from closeout items and cheap, generic low-grade Chinese products and is now more oriented towards brand name goods. It seems the focus is more on furniture and home decor, but they still have most of what they sold in the past, just in smaller numbers.
The electronics department at Big Lots has not changed much from what I can remember. They don't really sell many electronic items, but rather they sell a number of electronic accessories like cables, remotes, blank CDs/DVDs, CD cases, and things like that. They did have a large rack of Blu-Ray and maybe DVD movies by the front door and that did seem to attract a crowd of shoppers.
Anyway, these older Big Lots stores do feel a bit like a smaller version of a better maintained and better stocked vintage Kmart. I can see some vintage retail bloggers covering these stores more now that Kmart is pretty much gone. Now that Big Lots has more brand name goods, it could also be an alternative to Walmart and Target for many items. The prices aren't as good as they were during the MacFrugal's era for sure, but they're still competitive. It seems that Big Lots fits in a niche between Walmart and the Family Dollar/Dollar General type stores.
It seems the Rice Village Half Price Books closed for good this past weekend. It was reported that their landlord wanted a big increase in rent. I'm not sure if they will relocate or what, but that was an iconic location. The Historic Houston Retail blog did a nice post about it which is worth checking out.
Gordmans except for the purple signage is very plain, I guess they want the merchandise to stand out. The retail shutdowns are hitting them at possibly the worst time while they have been trying to save the business.
DeleteIt is strange how they cut the store down to make room for a Walgreens. I guess they had some good support built that they trusted to keep the building up. Ever since the collapse at Northline Mall years back, I am always concerned when they cut down parts of buildings. I am guessing that Big Lots was not open yet when they modified the old Kmart.
Big Lots has actually been a quarterly visit or more for me. They have some decent prices and a decent selection of grocery items these days. You are right that they have some better brands in stock these days. They still carry some weird items, but they have a lot of name brand items now.
That is a tough break for Rice Village. That area is becoming a pricey place to live and do business with the continued expansion of the nearby medical center. More and more places like this are going to go away as the land becomes too valuable.
Big Lots was probably open when the old FM 1960 & Jones Rd. Kmart was turned into Hobby Lobby and Walgreens. If it wasn't yet a Big Lots, it was certainly open as a MacFrugal's. What is Big Lots there now started as a Pic-N-Save in around 1988 or 1989 (of course, that spot opened originally as a greenhouse style Kroger when the Kmart did in around 1978-1979). Pic-N-Save changed their name to MacFrugal's. Then, around the turn of the century, the company behind Big Lots merged with the company behind MacFrugal's and then all the MacFrugal's stores became Big Lots. There certainly have been some name changes with that store over the years, but the Big Lots in that shopping center has had more than a 30 year presence in that spot at this point.
DeleteBig Lots has a pretty major presence in this area with the Jones Rd. store, the Hwy. 6 store near FM 529, the store near Willowbrook Mall in the former Toys R Us, and the North Oaks location in the former TG&Y. That location has been a Pic-N-Save/MacFrugal's/Big Lots as long as the Jones Rd. location. The North Oaks and Jones Rd. locations are certainly rather vintage. The Toys R Us location is more modern since it only opened a few years ago.
Big Lots used to sell a lot of automotive and hardware products at one time. All of those products have been consolidated to basically a single aisle now. That's a shame because I got some good deals on stuff like car wash detergent in the past, but oh well. They still have enough everyday household items to be a good alternative to a Walmart or Target if people don't want to buy those items from grocery stores. I do appreciate the vintage aspects of their stores.
My guess is that the structural load on that Kmart was probably pretty balanced since they could spread columns out across the sales floor. At something like a mall, there are spots where they don't want columns so the weight distribution might not be as balanced. I'm certainly not an architect though, but hopefully that Hobby Lobby is on solid footing. It's survived about 20 years now so I think it'll be okay.
The Northline Mall wall collapse was certainly a big deal. It was probably one of the biggest news stories in Houston in the 1990s. I remember visiting the mall a year or two after the collapse to go to the Montgomery Ward there and the images of the scene right after the collapse were certainly on my mind. I saw some Channel 13 news clips from the day the collapse happened on YouTube about a year ago.
The closure of the Rice Village Half Price Books is a real shame because that Half Price Books is what helped make that area a neat place to be in my mind. There are still a few unique shops in that area, but they'll probably be priced out as well and replaced with cookie cutter retailers of little interest to us. Oh well, at least suburban Half Price Books shouldn't have to worry about massive rent hikes.
I have really good memories of the Willowbrook Sears back when I was younger. When my family used to go, we always used to enter through to west entrance, where the electronics and optical were on your left entering the store. I remember that there was a smell near optical and electronics that I loved. Another thing I liked was the sound of the escalators. I always asked my parents to go to the second floor. For some reason, I loved the escalators. I always had this strange fear of my shoelaces getting caught in the escalator. The last time I visited was either Thanksgiving or Black Friday 2019. I was saddened and confused when the electronics were missing. I looked and looked, but I concluded that the electronics were gone. The second floor was also changed, but I don’t know how it was changed. When they announced that they were closing, I was shocked, because that was one of my favorite childhood stores.
DeleteThanks for sharing your memories of this Sears store. Deerbrook has been my main store for years, but every now and then we would go to Willowbrook.
DeleteSears stopped getting new electronics around 2017, their electronics departments started shrinking a few years before. Then they eventually sold off their remaining inventory of TV's and moved the remaining electronics into a random spot in the store. Willowbrook was one of the few Sears stores that still had TV's for sale in early 2019. I managed to find one left when I went to the store in January, not sure if it was in the stockroom or a returned TV though. Kmart has mostly stopped getting new electronics as well. Recent videos show mostly barren electronics departments with a bunch of movies, some TV's, and a small selection of random electronics.
Big Lots is taking over a lot of abandoned Toys R Us locations. I keep forgetting about the brand names that became Big Lots like Pic-N-Save, and MacFrugals.
DeleteI remember the hardware and auto aisles when they were better. I guess that is one of the product lines they sacrificed for the furniture they now carry. The Humble Big Lots has the extra furniture store so it did it take up store space there. The furniture store part of the store was closed off for many years and was part of the old hardware store that Big Lots replaced.
Kmart did make some solid buildings. As long as they kept up with the roof, they seemed to last for 40 years +. We remember the one Kmart though that was the Trading Fair flea market where the roof eventually fell in. That was from many years of neglect though.
Big Lots should be fine. I just remembered that San Jacinto Mall was partially demolished while it was still open without any issues. If that neglected mall fell without any issues, I wonder what happened at Northline.
I really need to visit a Half Price Books in the future when business is back to normal. It has been probably close to a year since I went to one. I rarely buy music, books, or movies these days so they don't have much to offer me right now unfortunately. With that being said, I seem to find something worth buying about 50% of the time I go to a Half Price Books.
The Willowbrook Mall Sears was my local Sears as well. I do have an interesting story about the escalators there. Many years ago, maybe 25 years ago, I was on the second story of the Willowbrook Sears when I started to hear screaming from an adult coming from the up escalator. Someone stopped the escalator and it seemed, though I'm not sure, that someone had a panic attack while on the escalator. Maybe someone got their shoelaces stuck, but I don't think so. The paramedics were called out. When I ride that escalator at Sears in the years since, which has often been out of order in recent years, I do sometimes think of the screaming I heard that one day years ago. I also found it amusing that the escalators in that store were made by Montgomery Escalators. I figured that would have been more appropriate at Montgomery Ward, but surely the two companies were completely unrelated.
DeleteWhen Big Lots started selling furniture at the FM 1960 & Jones Rd. store, they opened a separate room on the left side of the store. Perhaps they got the space from Weiner's, but I don't know for sure. It seemed odd to me at the time that they would sell furniture given the general quality of MacFrugal's/Big Lots items at the time, but they must do well with it because it's a big point of emphasis for them. I'm not sure where the North Oaks store puts their furniture because that store seemed smaller to me.
Big Lots really seems to emphasize furniture, home decor/housewares, and seasonal stuff now. They've had a big seasonal presence going back to the MacFrugal's days. Some other areas have been squeezed a bit, but still exist except for clothing which I think has been completely removed. It seems Big Lots is more focused these days on products with less sales, but higher profit margins rather than selling a lot of a particular product with very thin profit margins.
A lot of the Kmarts which just recently closed were 50-55 year old stores which were still in reasonable condition even with Lampert levels of maintenance over the last 15 years. Kmart and others like Woolco seemed to build solid stores. A lot of 1990s Kmarts and Wal-Marts were built with conversion to Super/Supercenter stores in mind so they were probably built with the ability to knock a wall down. I don't think Kmart converted very many regular Kmarts to Super Kmarts, but Walmart did that with some frequency including the former Willowbrook area Wal-Mart. The Willowbrook area Target was probably built in 2006 with this in mind as well as there is a lot of empty space next to the store, but with Target moving away from Super Targets, it'll probably never get converted.
Home Depot caught some negative publicity when the walls of one of their stores collapsed during a tornado in Missouri about a decade ago. It seems their stores use a style of construction which makes the walls more prone to collapsing if the roof gets ripped off the store compared to other stores like Wal-Mart who use a more solid design. There's some info on the Home Depot Wikipedia page if you want to read more about it. I suppose don't shop at a store like a Home Depot during a storm which might produce tornadoes.
I have not been stopping at Half Price Books as much as I was a couple of years ago, but I still stop by one every couple of months at least I would say as I like seeing if they have any music cassette and CDs I might want. Lately they've been getting a lot of new, sealed Super Audio CD classical music albums from the Netherlands for about $5-6 each. That's a great price for new SACD albums. Even otherwise, they do have some oddball albums.
Books, music, and movies are mostly what HPB has, but they do have video games too of course. I have not checked out their video games in a number of years so I can't really say much about pricing or selection.
That is not the first time I have heard of an escalator emergency. I wonder how many of these happened when the technology was first being used years ago.
DeleteBig Lots probably got squeezed out of the clothing business by Ross, Burlington, and TJ Maxx. The size and volume of their clothing sales gives them the advantage over the smaller players.
Big Lots can probably outbid furniture retailers for closeout items. They do have decent quality furniture for the price. We have bought some furnishings from them, but no big ticket furniture items yet.
A Lampert maintenance plan is probably worse than nothing at all for the buildings. I did not think about all of the conversions of the Walmart stores. A lot of those stayed open while walls were getting knocked down. One in particular on Beltway 8 near I-10 West, stayed open while half of a new store was built onto the old store. Then they moved the store into the new portion to tear down the old store. Then they built the other half back with the higher ceilings and connected the buildings to make it into a Supercenter.
Warehouses have wide spaced out columns that can be dangerous if one of the columns is compromised. They put up the buildings so fast that there is not much to them. Concrete walls, support beams, all attached to the support across the ceiling/roof.
Half Priced Books has been struggling with their used video game departments lately. People are selling their old video games online more often since retailers lowball you on offers. I would be very surprised to see any good games there these days.
There was a time many years ago when the elevator at the Willowbrook Mall Foley's was known for getting stuck. This is the location which is now the Macy's women's and housewares store. I assume this has been taken care of by now, but who knows. I had a family member who got stuck in it in the 1980s. In the 1990s, I saw firemen trying to get people out of the elevator a couple of times after it got stuck again. Those were just the times I saw it, I'm sure it happened times when I didn't see it since it's not like I was spending a lot of time at Foley's even though they did have a decent electronics department up there at one time. So, yeah, I never use the elevator at that store as you can well imagine, lol.
DeleteThat Town & Country area Wal-Mart story sounds like the Willowbrook Mall area Best Buy. The original building was replaced with a bigger, newer store in around the late 1990s. They built the new store behind the old one, but they had to tear down part of the older store to make room for the newer one. Meanwhile, the older store remained open until the new one was ready. It was certainly an odd traditional period. The old Best Buy was probably less than 10 years old when it was knocked down.
You're probably right that anyone who knows anything about vintage video games would not sell them to a Half Price Books. Most of the video games I see there are Xbox 360/Xbox One type games which can just as easily be purchased from a GameStop. Of course, I don't look very closely so maybe there are some hidden gems, but I doubt there are many of those. It's easier to find good CDs and such since they tend to not be valuable, but I once did find some MFSL (Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab) used CDs at Half Price Books. One was priced at about $40, which is about right, but the other was only like $4. I obviously purchased that! Classical MFSL CDs aren't worth what rock MFSL CDs are worth, but it's still worth more than $4. It had good music on it anyway.
If I remember correctly, the types of clothing MacFrugal's sold was worse than Kmart/Wal-Mart grade clothing. I don't think their customers are missing anything with those not being sold anymore. I remember buying some Chinese screwdrivers from Pic-N-Save/MacFrugal's many years ago. I was just using them for small tasks like screwing in plates on light switches and stuff and those screwdrivers still managed to break. Either the handles would break off or the metal would snap in half under any pressure at all. OTOH, I remember finding some very high quality German mechanical pencils at MacFrugal's in the early 1990s. You never really knew what they would have. They had sub-Tozai quality goods, but also some good things. Now, things are pretty consistent at Big Lots and their stuff is pretty similar in quality to what is at Walmart and such. They may still have some Tozai grade stuff though.
The furniture at Big Lots is from major brands. I don't know if they make discount furniture just for Big Lots of if they get closeout models that didn't sell. I suppose Big Lots realizes that Walmart and Target don't sell major furniture like that and they decided to take advantage of that hole in the marketplace.
I did not know the history of that elevator at the Willowbrook Foley's. I wonder if any of the similarly designed stores from the same era had the same issue.
DeleteThe Walmart was an 80's era store that was upgraded about 10 years ago or so. I am not surprised to hear about a Best Buy being replaced after 10 years. A lot of the original Best Buy stores in the area have been replaced.
Maybe Half Price Books has gotten better with giving a fair price for items. I just remember the times I dropped off bags of books and movies for just $20 each time. At the time they could have resold those items for well over $100.
Big Lots has done a great job of differentiating themselves in a crowded marketplace. They have better selections than the Dollar General type stores, higher quality items than Dollar Tree, no clothing to compete with the discount chains for, and they are the only store of its size with furniture that I can think of. The rent to own places are ridiculously expensive so Big Lots doesn't have to worry much about those places taking over.
For reasons I cannot remember now, I used to travel down that part of the Beltway towards I-10 somewhat often in the early 1990s. I remember when that Wal-Mart first opened and I may have visited it a time or two in the early days. It was a very odd location since the front of it wasn't facing the freeway. That does happen sometimes, but the store really wasn't all that visible. Still, it managed to stay busy so I don't think it hurt them any.
DeleteIt is funny how a lot of the early Best Buy and Circuit City stores in this area were replaced with newer stores even before the old stores were outdated. In the case of Best Buy, the store was on the smaller side. I think it was bigger than the original Greenspoint and Almeda area Best Buys, but it was still on the smaller side for that time. Of course, these days, Best Buy would probably like to return to those smaller stores, but they've managed to fill up their space with profitable major appliances which used to just be a small part of their stores in the early days. The newer Circuit City stores never had the same upscale feel as the older 'plug' style stores, but maybe they were trying to emphasize better price competitiveness with their more basic stores they had at the end.
When I go to Half Price Books, the purchase counter is near the CD bins at the North Oaks and Copperfield stores. Thus, I can hear what offers they are making people and they are usually lowball offers. People are just glad to get something for things they otherwise would have just dumped off at a thrift store I suppose. Often, the purchasers really don't have time to check each item carefully.
I will say that the North Oaks HPB used to do a good job sorting their CD bins alphabetically. In my last visit or two, things were really sloppy. There was no sorting at all. It was quite disappointing.
I think Big Lots has a pretty good discount store niche for themselves. They just need to be careful not to focus too much on furniture and to keep some of their departments which draw in regular customers like grocery and everyday housewares. I think one of the problem Sears has now is that they're too dependent on appliance and mattress shoppers who might only need to shop at their stores once very 5-10 years. Stores need everyday type items to ensure that their customers remember that they're still around.
I suspect with cash being tight now for many families, discount stores like Big Lots will stand to gain customers. I'm not sure if they have a strong supply chain to deal with the demand for items like toilet paper and cleaning supplies right now. Their supply chain should be more consistent now that they're more of a normal discount store rather than just a closeouts store where inventory might be inconsistent.
I know the My Florida Retail blog has covered Big Lots stores in their area rather extensively. I'm not sure if covering Big Lots stores in this area is worthwhile, but there are some stores which have come up multiple times over the years by new commenters like the Jones Rd. store and the North Oaks store. You've covered the latter one a little bit when you posted that vintage MacFrugal's mall entrance sign. Covering Big Lots stores in former Toys R Us locations might be interesting since you've covered Toys R Us pretty extensively. Anyway, it seems like Kbloggers will need new retailers to cover and it seems Big Lots might be one of them due to the vintage nature of many of their stores and since there are usually stories to tell about prior tenants with Big Lots locations.
Speaking of Walmart, I found out that the Greenspoint Walmart and the Willowbrook Walmart, look exactly the same on the outside, except for the auto center. It’s probably because they weren’t built as Supercenters, when they first opened, but rather converted into a Supercenter later on, so they have a higher ceiling in one part of the store, and a lower ceiling in the rest of the store.
DeleteThat is the Walmart I was talking about. It is away from most of the retail in the area and seems to do well.
DeleteI don't know if you had a chance to visit Circuit City's final concept, The City. Deerbrook Mall and Katy Mills had locations. If Circuit City had gone with this concept store 5 years sooner and kept their appliance departments they may still be around today.
I think the USA will wind up having a huge surplus of the items we can't easily find right now. Now that the initial wave of panic buying has subsided, I think stores will begin to catch up. Big Lots may be one of the last chains after the Walmarts, Targets, major grocers, and Warehouses get their supplies.
I think Sears is all in on appliances and mattresses now. It may be the only thing the have inventory left for them to specialize in.
Big Lots and Ollie's which is getting closer to our area are interesting retailers. Ollie's is a random store that has some really strange items for sale. Big Lots has some very retro stores and does not do much to improve their properties.
I never did visit one of those The City stores, the smaller concept. The relocated Willowbrook Mall area store which moved to the former Service Merchandise wasn't all that old when Circuit City closed and I also visited the relocated Almeda Mall area store which opened up near that Walmart around 2006 or so. Those stores were completely forgettable. I only have a vague idea of how they looked. Meanwhile, those 'plug' style stores are still fresh in my mind. There were a few of them left when Circuit City closed. I visited the one next to The Woodlands Mall during the liquidation sale and I remember that more than I remember the newer stores. If I remember correctly, The Woodlands Mall Circuit City was located close to the Sears.
DeleteEliminating major appliances was a huge mistake for Circuit City. Ultimately, there probably wasn't enough business for both Best Buy and Circuit City to survive. Best Buy usually makes the right decisions. Circuit City was a bit spotty at making decisions.
I'm sure certain items will not sell so hotly as we continue in 2020. The people hoarding toilet paper will surely stop hoarding it, but I suspect things like hand sanitizer and masks will continue to be hot sellers. It'll be interesting to see what products sell, which don't, and how that might change the retail landscape for the next few years.
I've seen pictures of Ollie's before on Flickr and such. It is indeed an odd store and a bit like what Big Lots used to be. It's also got a bit of Tuesday Morning to it. I'm not sure if they may try the Houston market, but they might be an interesting addition.
Thanks for clarifying the Walmarts. We were unsure about the Willowbrook store having a partial or full warehouse ceiling.
DeleteThose early-mid 2000's Circuit City stores were not very memorable. They were similar to the CompUSA setup with more variety, but not exciting. These were their concept stores once appliances were taken away.
DeleteI am hoping that supply chains get caught up soon. Empty shelves are a scary sight.
I have not been to a Tuesday Morning in a very, very long time. Maybe it is worth checking out once stores begin to open back up.
Apparently, there were 2 Kmarts in Greenspoint. One where the Burlington is, and one near Fry’s.
DeleteCircuit City reminds me of good times. When I was very young, I used to think it was Circus City. I always asked my parents to go to either the Galleria area on or the Willowbrook one, but they said that they would rather go to Best Buy instead. Strangely, I don’t remember their bankruptcy. Also, another good Circuit City memory, that was the topic of you blog when it was first started it. I feel so nostalgic thinking about Circuit City.
DeleteThe Burlington was actually a Target. We shopped there many times back in the 80's. I think the Kmart that was in the Fry's shopping center had relocated from Little York. The Little York former Kmart building was later a Trading Fair flea market.
DeleteSorry for the misinformation. I read that the Burlington was a Kmart somewhere when I looked up “Kmart Houston TX locations” on Google.
DeleteThe Circuit City website is still in business after reopening a couple of years ago. I was hoping that they would open up some store fronts, but that has not happened yet. Comp USA which reminds me of the newer post 2000 Circuit City, had a few stores after being revived. Sadly all of those only lasted a few years. The same company that bought Comp USA bought Circuit City, but they never reopened the stores.
DeleteThe original Willowbrook and Galleria stores had the old school plug entrance. The shopping center where the Galleria area Circuit City was still has the color scheme of Circuit City above the smaller store fronts.
No worries, there is a nearby location to Greenspoint about 15 minutes away in Humble. The old Super Kmart in Humble is split between a Burlington and Academy. That building sat vacant for several years before they gutted it out for the new stores.
DeleteThat Super Kmart replaced an old Kmart across Highway 59 at the 1960 intersection. The Super Kmart did not even last 10 years, it was such a waste.
I was looking at Google Street View in the parking lot of the Willowbrook Walmart and I noticed something. The left side of the building, near the former garden center, has a grid like wall. The right side of the building has a different style of wall. Since the Willowbrook Walmart was originally not a Supercenter and as we know, old non-Supercenter Walmarts had grid-like walls. My theory is that the grid-like wall was leftover from the remodel that turned the Walmart into a Supercenter.
DeleteOne of my nearby Walmarts in Porter was converted similarly. The store has been remodeled twice since the conversion, but the ceilings inside of the store are the same as they were built. I wonder how many exterior elements are still intact.
DeleteThe Willowbrook and Porter Walmarts look about 95% the same. I was hunting for similar Walmarts and I found others that looked very similar to the Willowbrook location. The Greenspoint one, A San Antonio one on Stahl Road, A Temple TX one on Azalea Drive, and the Porter one you mentioned.
DeleteI bet there were a lot more that have since been replaced. Walmart used to hop from building to building every 10 years or so. It was unsustainable, way too many locations were left abandoned.
DeleteUnfortunately, the McAllen Kmart is closing as well.
ReplyDeleteIt is the end of an era.
DeleteThere used to be this website called The West Houston Archives that had old Houston retail pictures dating back to around 2008. Unfortunately, it was discontinued because the person who posted on it couldn’t do anymore because whenever he tried to post, it was too glitchy. Now, it is, weird I guess. Anyway, here is the link: https://www.westhoustonarchives.com/ . There is another link on the website, here it is if you can’t see it: http://sedoparking.com/privacy-policy/us/index.html .
ReplyDeleteI do remember that site. It had road construction and retail updates as well as area history. Some of the names of the roads in the area have an interesting history behind them, and they did a good job of keeping all of that info on their site.
DeleteI wonder where stores get their store closing signs, you know, the ones that say, “GOING OUT OF BUISNESS! EVERYTHING MUST GO! FIXTURES FOR SALE!”. I also wonder if you can buy these signs.
ReplyDeleteThe liquidators bring the signs in for the closings. I have personally witnessed the store closing signs being put up at a couple of stores now.
DeleteYou can always talk to the main liquidation manager about buying signs and other things at a store closing sale. Sometimes they are nice and they will sell you anything, and sometimes they will not sell certain items.
If I bought some store-closing signs, like the ones being talked about, I would hang them up everywhere around my home except in the bathrooms. I would also display them on my windows so it looks like my home is a store that is closing down.
DeleteYou might have some unwanted attention from passersby looking for some deals. If you have any unwanted items, that may be a good way to advertise for a garage sale. I would like to see how it looks if you manage to do this.
DeleteI just thought it also would be cool to have the mentioned store closing sign plus a store sign. For example, I would have a Sears sign attached to the front of my home, plus the store closing sign. Unfortunately, I probably couldn’t afford to buy any of those signs. Maybe one day, I’ll be able to afford it.
DeleteThe letters for the Sears signs are huge. I saw the ones that were on the Sears at the Mall of the Mainland entrance after they pulled them down. I am not sure what happened to them after that.
DeleteI hope you get 1,000,000 (One million) total page views!
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the comment. Hopefully we will hit that benchmark in 2020.
DeleteA cool thing they have at a liquidating store(or any store, closing or not) would be the fire escape map, which show all of the departments and the exits. A cool thing to do with the map is buy it or take a picture of it. If I took a picture of it or bought it, I would try recreating the store like building a model of the store with clay, paper, etc, building the store in LEGOS, building the store in Minecraft, or building it in SketchUp. I personally would like to try to go and buy the Willowbrook Mall Sears fire escape map so I can recreate it, but if it’s not for sale, I would be fine just taking a picture. The Sears is closing in April, so unfortunately, I might miss going at all because of flu season/coronavirus. I know I could possibly, just maybe, find it on Google Images, but it would be so cool to have the map in my collection.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteThat would be something cool to try out. Technology is getting better, maybe one day we will be able to walk around some of the stores that are lost forever in VR.
DeleteI made a map of the layout of the Willowbrook Sears. I would say it is accurate, but there might be some mistakes, because I had to rely on memory, Yelp, and Google Maps. You can use Minecraft and SketchUp in VR.
DeleteHave you posted your work online yet, or are you still finishing it up. I would like to check it out if it is online.
DeleteI’m finishing up the details, including the register locations, and the department locations.
DeleteKeep me posted I wouldn't mind checking it out when it is finished.
DeleteI finished the map. If you would like to see it, I would like to know how I can show you the map. If the map has any errors, please let me know so I can fix it.
DeleteYou can send it to Southernmalls@gmail.com
DeleteDid you get the map?
DeleteOops. I might have sent it to the wrong person. Please tell me if you received the map.
DeleteYes I did. I will send some feedback.
DeleteI’ve updated the Sears Willowbrook map I made back in March. Would you like to see the updated version? I could e-mail it to you if you want.
DeleteSure I will be glad to see it southernmalls@gmail.com
DeleteI hope struggling stores like Sears survive the coronavirus effect. People are trying to avoid malls, especially after the North Star Mall incident in San Antonio. I really hope these stores pull through financially, because worst-case scenario, there will be a lot of empty store fronts eveywhere. Best-case scenario, there are very little store closures.
ReplyDeleteSears is in such a bad position, it is going to be very difficult to see them surviving. The companies that are barely squeaking by are going to fail if this shutdown drags on for several weeks. They can't even unload the merchandise in the store closing sales right now, so it will be interesting to see how all of this pans out.
DeleteThe coronavirus shutdowns are probably going to have a devastating impact on the fragile retailers who were on the verge of bankruptcy, or at least massive store closures, even under ordinary conditions. This is normally the time that retailers shake off the post-Christmas doldrums and gear up for people buying things for Easter, spring, and summer. This year, well, not so much.
DeleteI suspect that when the stores are allowed to reopen, they will continue to struggle. There's going to be a certain number of people who will still be wary of spending much time in public and, of course, a lot of people will have suffered from job losses or a loss of income. Perhaps some people will be so happy to be out of the house that they'll be eager to go to the malls and catch up on their shopping habit, but I'm not sure if that'll offset the negatives.
I suspect that some of the retailers most hurt by this situation are JCPenney, Stage Stores, Macy's, Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Barnes & Noble, and Kohl's. There are probably several others, but that's at least a start. We'll have to see what happens, but I'd expect to see accelerated store closures.
Grocery stores and electronics stores might actually be benefiting from the situation, but it's hard to say. Certainly grocery stores are showing their value to the community. Electronics stores are reportedly seeing bumps in the sales of new PCs and other work from home equipment. Of course, now that so many people have new computers, the traditional Back To School bump in PC sales may not be as significant in the late summer/early fall.
Sears and Kmart will continue to struggle unless Lampert pumps more money into the operation. Sears and Kmart hardly even exist anymore and I'm sure more store closures were going to happen regardless of the situation.
I don't know how this impacts the Deerbrook and Willowbrook Mall liquidation sales. Will these stores still close on their expected dates or will they live on just a little bit longer? I don't know. I was hoping to visit the Willowbrook store more than I have, but I've been staying at home as much as possible so I have not been able to visit since the early days of the liquidation. It's possible I've already visited the store for the last time, but I don't know.
Some retailers like Best Buy will probably be okay since they continue to offer curbside pickup and have a strong Internet presence. Others that have struggled to make their websites user friendly will more than likely struggle to bring their business back once the stores open back up.
DeleteGroceries and other household item sales will calm down once the panic buying slows down and people are more cautious about spending money. I think there will be a boost in the economy if the checks arrive when businesses start to reopen. I just hope that this wave of confirmed cases starts to slow down, like it seems to be in a lot of countries. People are scared, a lot of the population is losing hours and jobs right now, good news needs to happen to get things going again.
Neiman Marcus is another one that is reported to be close to bankruptcy. The leveraged buyouts of many of these companies will take them into bankruptcy. No sales = no interest or principle paid off with their loans.
It is easy to think Sears and Kmart will be unable to overcome this. Somehow they have managed to survive this long with barely any inventory and many outdated store locations. I need to check out their website to see how things are going and if they are still delivering product to customers.
The liquidation sales at our Sears locations will probably be held back a week or two. The inventory at Deerbrook may take a while to sell down, the store still has a lot of clothes and tools. There is really not much left to get excited about inside of the store, most of the good stuff is already gone.
Another problem the likes of JCPenney and Macy's will have is that now that companies have spent a lot of money in an emergency buying work at home equipment and now that employees are used to it, work from home will become more popular even once things return to normal. That means people will not need as much work clothing. That's bad news for the department stores, but it might be good news for the likes of Office Depot and Home Depot as now people will be spending money turning a part of their home into office space.
DeleteCurbside pickup will probably be a popular feature. In-store pickup was supposedly a very popular thing during this Christmas season and I suspect that trend will continue. Stores with a weak in-store pickup option will suffer, but I suspect retailers will see a drop in impulse buys with the curbside pickup.
Amazon may stand to gain from all of this. People who don't want to leave their houses can still shop at Amazon since the delivery workers are still working. I heard Amazon stopped taking delivery of new LPs, CDs, and stuff like that in order to keep as much warehouse space for stuff people were buying once the stay at home orders started. I reckon Amazon will resume receiving new inventory of music at some point, but this might hurt new album releases on physical media. Movie studios are releasing new movies directly to streaming. I'm sure customers will want that to continue even after things return to normal so movie theaters might struggle especially if their typical summer demand from kids being home is hurt by all of this.
Hopefully the Deerbrook and Willowbrook Mall Sears will live on a little longer now even if there isn't anything interesting left to buy except for fixtures. At least it'll give some people a last chance to visit these stores.
At a time when the logistics of retailers is being tested, I can't even imagine how long it must take Kmart to restock things like toilet paper and hand sanitizer. It seems Kmart's core markets are now in US territories and not the stores in the 50 states. Perhaps the economies of the territories have not been as hard hit, but I don't know what's going on there.
I did not even think of that. It sounds like commercial real estate may suffer if more companies decide to station employees at home. Maybe we will see a return of certain office products and electronics at some of these retailers.
DeleteI only tried curbside pickup once. The Sears app was acting up on me so I decided to go inside Sears to pickup my order instead. It was coincidentally for an online order of Kmart shirts that I attempted their curbside service with. I know grocers and other retailers are doing well with this service since they keep expanding it.
I noticed that certain items have disappeared from Amazon. A few items in my shopping cart are out of stock and have unknown dates to be back in stock. I guess it makes sense, but the prices on alternative choices are high. Ebay has been a better alternative lately.
There are some fixtures I may try to get from Sears when they reopen. I really want to get one of their newer signs with the 'Making moments happen' slogan.
Kmart has to be the last in line for deliveries of the essentials. The US territory stores are their money makers, since there is not much competition in those areas. I can only imagine the looks that are given when people see an order request from Sears/Kmart these days.
Commercial real estate probably will struggle a bit now. I'm sure corporations and smaller businesses will have to evaluate how big their offices need to be now that the work-from-home genie has left the bottle. Companies will probably need less office space than they did before.
DeleteCorporate travel will probably also be cutback rather significantly for at least the foreseeable future. Companies may deem it too risky to send employees to areas where there are infectious disease hotspots especially if there is some risk the employees could get trapped if travel bans are enacted. Here again, teleconferencing can probably replace a lot of corporate travel.
I suspect the residential real estate market might be impacted a bit as well. Aside from slowdowns caused by job losses/loss of income, people might prioritize having a lot of space over having a short commute to work if work-from-home sticks around for some after things return to normal. If that happens, the balance between inner-city/inner-suburbs and outer-ring suburbs might shift towards new developments in outer-ring suburbs which offer big houses for the same price as smaller, inner-city/inner-suburb houses.
I've only done in-store pickups for online orders from two retailers, Sears and Circuit City. The Circuit City one happened just a couple of months before they announced their closure in around 2008. I've picked up both Sears and Kmart orders from Sears. It's convenient since they have their own merchandise pickup area. Of course, with the Sears near me going away, I probably won't use that option anymore.
Some retailers have dysfunctional in-store pickup options. Barnes & Noble is one of these. If one orders an item online that is in-stock at the store, they can order it online and pick it up in the store. However, online orders from the warehouse cannot be sent to the store for in-store pickup. I don't know why they do that. It's quite an oversight, IMO. At least they do allow online orders to be returned to stores.
Hopefully you can pick up some good fixtures from these Sears stores. There should be some good items available, but I don't know about signage. Sometimes the liquidators are reluctant to sell items with the company's name on it except for carts and stuff like that.
I don't know if I can find the photo now, but a few months back I saw a photo of a guy in Michigan that got his hands on a vintage Kmart HVAC vent and he hung it up in his garage. That would be quite a conversation piece! I think he got the vent from the dumpster when they were renovating the ex-Kmart for the new tenant.
You would think stores like Kmart would be doing well since they have a pharmacy, sell some food items, medicine, and toilet paper/paper towels. I figured that they be packed like Walmart and Target, but who knows?
DeleteKmart has actually closed most of their pharmacies. There are about 10 or so left in the USA. The stores have not gotten very much in the way of deliveries since the 2019 bankruptcy. Inventory levels in several locations has been low, with entire aisles taken down because there is not enough inventory.
DeleteCompanies have been trimming their offices and a lot of people will probably lose their jobs because of this. Houston is going to get hit hard by layoffs if the economy does not bounce back quickly. Oil and gas production is in the red as well. Way too much inventory being produced for a huge loss in demand.
DeleteHome values may go down for a little while, but the county is releasing 2020 tax values trying to squeeze people for 2019 values.
My store pickup experience inside of Sears was always reliable. I have had issues at other stores with not being able to get an online price in the store and having to order the item online and wait for them to make it ready for pickup. I never understood why this is done sometimes.
I was glad that the Kmart liquidator was selling everything at the last store I went to. I had been wanting a Kmart stamped fixture for several years now.
Getting an old HVAC vent would be awesome, but I have no indoor space for something that large.
It would be cool if you went to a store closing sale and bought the shelves, and then opened a store yourself. For example, let’s say you went to a Sears closing sale, and it was toward the end of the sale. You buy whatever items are left, some shelves, and fixtures. Then sometime in the future, you open up a store that sells some of the stuff you bought from Sears, displaying the merchandise with the same shelves that were once part of Sears. It would be like a, I guess, a mini Sears. That’s just an example. You could do it with any closing store.
DeleteYeah it would be a nice project for someone to tackle. There is a guy who replicated parts of the old Yesterdays Arcade that was at the San Jacinto Mall. He even managed to get the sign for his room. If you want to check out his work, he goes by the name Yesterdays92 on YouTube.
DeleteLOL if I was President, I would inject/invest money into struggling companies like Sears/Kmart and try making it prosperous like they used to be.
DeleteSears was a beneficiary of the tax cuts that Trump enacted early in his presidency. They went through that money rapidly though. It would take a substantial investment to bring the company back to the way it was just a year ago. I hope that they are able to work things out, but it is not looking good.
DeleteI've had countless opportunities to go to this mall and squandered them all, and I just want to thank you for recording this place while you could, stay safe and best regards.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the well wishes, same to you. I have been documenting this mall for several years now with much more left to share. Sorry you never made it down there, it was a time capsule.
DeleteI hope your computer is fixed! If not, I hope it is soon!
ReplyDeleteThanks, I have been using a relatives computer until I decide to get my computer going again.
DeleteHere’s a cool suggestion for this blog. The readers of this blog could send stuff to you of stores that are closing. For example, the Sears at Willowbrook and Deerbrook. They are closing, and you could post pictures/stories/information that you have or that readers sent to you. You could do this with any store that is closing.
ReplyDeleteI definitely accept blog reader submissions for anything retail related. You can send me an email at Southernmalls@gmail.com
DeleteI will provide full credit for any reader submitted stories or photos. It might take me several days to post it to the blog, but if it is appropriate to the retail blog I will post it.
Here’s a cool fact. Did you know that Target had garden centers? I wonder if any Texas locations had any.
ReplyDeleteI remember when Super Target stores first opened, they sold live plants and had a large selection of garden products. Target was more than likely following the competition until they began to separate their brand identity from the discount retailers of the era.
DeleteI can't remember if any stores had a traditional garden center in the Houston area. I want to say they used to sell plants at the entrance like Kmart does these days, but I can't say that with certainty.
Houston was one of the first markets Target opened stores in when they started expanding out of the Midwest. Those earliest Houston Target stores were quite big and had a lot of things which Target stores no longer have like auto centers and paint. I can't say I specifically remember garden centers, but they probably did have them too.
DeleteThose original Houston Targets, which opened around 1970, closed down or relocated a long time back as far as I know. Probably the last remaining one was the one across the street from Almeda Mall which relocated in around 2006. If you ever saw that building, which is still around in modified form, you'll know that Targets back then were bigger than they are today except for Super Targets. Targets back then had grocery stores, but they were like the early Kmart Foods locations. That is to say that while the grocery department was next to the regular store, they weren't fully open to one another. Like Kmart Foods, I think Target had independent local grocers running those grocery stores.
Now that I think about it, I'm not sure if any 1980s Target locations are still open in Houston. I'm thinking the last of them closed or were relocated during the great move Target had to build new stores in around the year 2006. The North Oaks Mall Target moved to their current location near Willowbrook Mall in or around that year. The North Oaks Mall Target was not as old as some of the original Targets in town so it was more like a 1980s Target, but with some 1970s elements outside and inside like darker lighting. Another example of a very early Houston Target would have been the South Loop store which became the 2nd Houston Auchan for a while.
If you want to see what an older Target looked like, check out these photos from what must be the very late 1970s or very early 1980s. Some aspects of Targets then look somewhat like Targets today, but there are a number of big differences as well. You'll also notice that this store had a plant department near the snack bar. Even back then you could tell that Target stores were a bit more upscale looking and organized than Kmarts were back then.
Those photos are pretty awesome, those early stores look similar to the Kmart colors but they may he faded.
DeleteThat Almeda Target building certainly was similar in size to the Super Target locations. They also had the round ceiling vents like JCPenney stores from the 60's. There is another nearly identical former Target location near Plazamerica's Mall.
The colors at the old Target are somewhat similar to the colors on the classic orange stripes that were around the old Kmarts. I would say the Target colors were more red/red-orange and the Kmart stripes were more of a true orange/yellow-orange. Of course, as you probably well remember, orange was a very popular color in the 1970s so it showed up all over the place. You may remember the orange carpets that Wal-Mart had in their older style stores from the early 1980s. Wal-Mart had some brown and orange designs on the outside of their stores as well.
DeleteThe Target across from Almeda Mall was indeed quite large. I don't specifically remember the HVAC vents there, but I did shop there quite a bit in the last few years of that store before it relocated. I have yet to visit the new relocated store. What I do remember about the Almeda Target is that it had the rather dark look on the inside like the North Oaks Target. Aside from that, it looked just about the same on the inside as any other pre-1990s Target. Target maintained those old stores well.
For a while, Marshall's moved into the old unused grocery part of the Almeda Target. You're right that there was a vintage Target near Sharpstown as well. There was one near Memorial City Mall as well if I remember correctly. Obviously, this was before Target moved to the mall itself, but I can't remember if the vintage store closed before the new one opened.
There was some discussion earlier about the former Target on Greens Rd. near Greenspoint Mall which is now Burlington. Yes, that was indeed a Target and not a Kmart. I feel like that Target closed sometime in the early-to-mid 1990s. Maybe it closed when the Target Greatland (eventually turned into a Super Target) opened near The Woodlands Mall. There is a Super Target (I'm not sure if it's still Super) on Cypresswood, but I think that came later. Anyway, I never went to the Greenspoint Target, at least I don't think so, but it did look very similar to the Jones Rd. & FM 1960 Target which was my local Target before it relocated in around 2006.
There was a Target of that style somewhere near Meyerland I believe which closed and was turned into a Kmart which looked like a Target. I think I remember sharing a picture of that a few years back, but I can't find it now. I'm not talking about the Meyerland Plaza Target which went the other way around of course. That was a Venture-turned Kmart-turned Target all in a pretty short period of time.
I definitely remember the old Walmart and Kmart colors. I wonder if any flea markets in the USA still have any of these old interiors. I am guessing the old Homestead Road Kmart still has an old school interior, but it is probably in ruins by now.
DeleteWas the old Target near Memorial City next to the Randall's shopping center? That area had changed so much over the years, it is hard to remember. The older Toys R Us that was abandoned for over a decade, has been demolished. There is a new tower going up on the site now.
That Kmart in the former Target was a very rare conversion. I really wish I knew about that store when it was open.
Also in Meyerland, it holds the only (I think) Houston area non-Supercenter Walmart. It’s a bit south of Meyerland Plaza.
DeleteThere is one more that I know of. It is on I-10 near Uvalde. The property the store is on, I believe is the reason why they can't expand.
DeleteIf you want a real treat, Navasota Texas about an hour outside of the city has a 25-30,000 square foot Walmart store. On my last visit a couple of years back, it was still setup like the older stores with the electronics department in the middle of the store with only 6 front registers. One of these days I may do a better job of documenting that store and one further away towards Austin in Giddings Texas that is about the same size.
You are absolutely right that it is hard to remember what things were like around Memorial City Mall even 15 years ago because so much has changed. If I remember correctly, the old Target was basically where the Marshall's and OfficeMax is now. I could be wrong about that, but I think that's where it was. This is next to where that Kroger is that is in the old Safeway/AppleTree. That's a very odd Kroger, but there is another one just like it not far from there on Gessner.
DeleteIs the Homestead Rd. Kmart still standing? I remember reading some years back that there was real pressure from the city to tear that building down, but I don't know what happened to it. I know the old Spring Branch Kmart from 1962 was finally torn down a few years ago and apartments were built on the land.
I saw a photo some years back, maybe around 2012-2013, of a thrift or antique store which was in a Kmart and they still had the vintage Kmart stripes. Like with the Kmart in the old Target photo, I suspect a lot of these gems were deleted when Flickr changed their policies to limit the amount of photos a person could have with a free account. A lot of captured retail history was flushed away with that.
Is the Navasota Walmart still open? I heard that Walmart was moving to close those small, classic stores a couple of years ago. I saw photos of some classic stores which were closed even though they just recently had renovations.
Kroger not Randall's oops, yes that is the same shopping center I was thinking about.
DeleteYes the Homestead Kmart is still sitting there. I pass by every now and then as a way around really bad traffic on Highway 69.
Flickr really messed up by limiting photos. You would think the site could generate enough traffic to keep them from charging. I am surprised Blogger has not done the same. It would take me forever to move over 10 years of work to a new page.
According to the google reviews, those 2 Walmart stores are still open. Walmart has been randomly closing stores every year now, so they could be next.
If you ever decide to cover Kroger locations on this blog, that Kroger and the similar one on Gessner are certainly two Kroger locations to put on your list. Both of them have AppleTree era signs on the outside indicating what departments the store has. The one near Memorial City looks even more like the classic AppleTree look.
DeleteAlso, that Memorial City Kroger has a vintage shopping center Walgreens in it. I say it's vintage, but the store is probably more modern looking on the inside than most Walgreens. It must receive updates fairly regularly.
I'm surprised that Homestead Kmart is still there. At this point, I suppose the city won't knock it down any time soon. That building must be in terrible condition though.
Flickr's change in policy was really a disaster. They already ran off a lot of good retail photographers from the early 2010s with their redesign in around 2014-2015. The photo limit ran off even more users. The good news is that the changes encouraged some photographers to start regional retail blogs. Given that, hopefully Blogger doesn't get any ideas!
I may cover more supermarkets in the future. I struggle to get my content out in a timely manner, but grocery stores could help fill in gaps with the larger articles that take a while to upload.
DeleteThere is an old school Walgreens in Humble, but it has the recent remodel. The managers office is in the front of the store and the old doors are still in use.
That area of town is struggling so I guess it is not a priority of the city to tear the building down. There are some up and coming residential developments off of Tidwell and Little York that may help bring that area of town up.
I barely make any money off of the blog so it would not be cool if Blogger wanted to start charging to run a blog here. I also don't want to put a whole bunch of ads that slow down the page and frustrate readers. I have one ad space that generates about $100 for me every 2 years on average.
Supermarkets seem to garner a lot of interest these days on retail blogs so it would not be a bad idea to cover them. We certainly have a number of interesting supermarkets in town, Kroger or otherwise. Some interesting stores have closed in recent years so it might be worthwhile to cover the remaining oddballs before they also close.
DeleteThe Walgreens near Memorial City in the Kroger shopping center has some vintage aspects inside if one knows what to look for. For example, I remember some of the older shopping center era Walgreens around here having a raised ceiling near the checkouts. The Memorial City area store has that still.
I remember at vintage Eckerd's locations, the manager would have a little office cubicle in a booth right at the entrance of the store. I can't remember now if Walgreens was the same. There may still be some CVS stores that are in vintage Eckerd's shopping center locations, but some of these have closed in the last five or so years. If any still exist, I wonder if they have a similar layout to what Eckerd's had. Probably not I would guess.
I took a virtual road trip down Homestead yesterday on Google Maps. Wow, that is a fairly blighted stretch. I knew it was struggling, but it's really struggling. There are some oddball and probably vintage supermarkets on that stretch. One which caught my eye was the Big City Supermarket on Homestead between Hartwick and Guadalupe. Perhaps you've seen it before. Based on the Google Maps images of the store, it has HVAC vents which look similar to the vintage Kmart vents in design, but they are a bit smaller. Some older Krogers and other stores had those vents. The store also has almost 1970s looking aisle markers and register lights. They also have an odd vending machine which must be seen to be believed.
I looked at the back of the old Homestead Kmart from Bretshire Rd. and it looks like vegetation might be starting to take over the building from the back side. It's hard to tell how bad things are though. The rest of that shopping center looks like it has really fallen apart even compared to photos of that place from around 2012-13. I'm surprised the city isn't more eager to do something with that property.
$100 every 2 years probably doesn't even cover the gas money it takes to cover some of these places, but at least it's something. I'm glad that the page loads quickly. At least you're making something off the blog. I reckon the retail bloggers were driving a lot of traffic to Flickr and not only were they not being paid, but they were being told to pay so they could host their pictures. That's a bad deal. I'm glad that bad decision led to people setting up their own retail blogs. I'm not sure if you've had a chance to check any of the newer ones out, but there's some good stuff on them.
One of the old Greenhouse Krogers in Crosby is getting redeveloped. That store closed less than 2 years ago. I may have to visit some of those old school markets. I really like the Fiesta neon signs, but I wonder if any stores still have them.
DeleteI have passed by the Big City Market numerous times, but I never realized it is that old school.
There are a few pockets of new development near Homestead so maybe things will turn around in that area.
Speaking of Kmart, the McAllen Kmart officially closed at 4pm today April 11th. I called the store to find out when their last day was and they actually answered the phone a few minutes ago.
There are still a few Greenhouse Krogers left in the Houston area. In some cases, like the Copperfield and Texas City stores, Kroger has given these stores new facades to at least somewhat hide the Greenhouse design. In other cases, like the Seabrook and Cullen stores, the stores still look like Greenhouse stores. Some stores, like the Veterans Memorial store near North Oaks Mall, have some sort of renovation where Kroger has done something to update the outside of the store, but it still very much looks like a Greenhouse store. Of course, some of these stores have updated interiors with concrete floors, but some still have the white vinyl floors.
DeleteMy guess is that some Fiestas still have the neon. The Willowbrook/Willowchase store most certainly still does and it's certainly a location which should be documented since it was a fancy store when it opened in around 1988 and it has hardly changed even though it still looks nice. Of course, I am biased about that location since it is my local location! There are some more inner-city Fiestas which are quite odd and deserve to be documented as well. Some of those probably have neon.
That stretch of Homestead Rd. is very odd. Even though there are a lot of neighborhoods and such right off that road, there really isn't much chain retail on that stretch at all aside from Dollar General, Family Dollar, auto part stores, and some things like that. Even local chain grocers who specialize in stores in lower-income areas, like Food Town and Sellers Bros., aren't there. The residents in those neighborhoods have to rely on truly independent grocery stores like the Big City Supermarket. It seems that even the big name fast food places have mostly ignored that populated stretch of Homestead which is rather odd. It seems a bit odd that Kmart was able to survive in that spot for ~30 years when it seems nobody else wants to touch that area, but I'm sure the locals were glad that Kmart was around when they were around.
It seems we are now officially without Kmart here in Texas. I suppose it was good timing calling when you did. If you called Kmart any later, nobody would have answered. Maybe the liquidators will be around for a few more days to clean up the place and get the last bits of sold fixtures to their new owners.
I read an article which was discussing how a Sears in southern California which closed earlier this year is being turned into an emergency hospital. Although it's unfortunate that there is a need for these makeshift hospitals, these former Sears locations are probably good for these emergencies. The only thing is I'd imagine doctors and nurses need more plumbing than what a department store normally has for hand washing and stuff like that, but maybe they're able to quickly add such things to these locations.
Sounds like Kroger has some interesting stores still out there.
DeleteI need to document that Willowbrook Fiesta. That store has aged well and still looks fairly new inside. Maybe when Sears at Willowbrook Mall opens back up, I can make it down there.
There is also a decent sized Fiesta on Mesa and Tidwell, but the rest of the area supermarkets are all on 59/69. Kroger pulled out from Aldine Mail Rt. and 59/69 a couple of years ago without a true replacement store. The options are lacking in that area, that is probably why there are a ton of gas stations and Dollar Generals in that area.
They had a lot of fixtures sold when I was there about a month ago. Now would be an awesome time to see the store, maybe someone in the area was able to document the final days for us to see. I wonder if anyone bought the blue light kiosks they were selling?
That is a good use for an old Sears. There are hundreds more across the USA that are vacant that could be put to good use right now. Hopefully they can get a good backup water system to handle all of the sanitation of the space.
Sears stores are tentatively scheduled to reopen on April 30th. I don't know if our stores will reopen, but I plan on driving by one day soon to see.
They should do that with places like Northwest Mall here! It would be a really great idea if the City of Houston did that with the abandoned malls here, that would be a great hospital alternative.
DeleteNortheast Houston has a large section with no Kroger presence at all after the Aldine Mail Route Kroger closed. That's a shame and it's a real shame that we lose a very vintage Superstore era Kroger. For a while after that store closed, I thought we lost our last Superstore style Kroger, but I think I saw one on Memorial Dr. near the Memorial Dr. and Dairy Ashford Randall's. That Kroger looks like it was expanded at some point though. I suppose we'll know if that area is on the rebound if a Kroger ever re-opens there, but I don't think that'll be happening anytime soon.
DeleteThere is a grocery store across Aldine Mail Route from the old Kroger called Food City. I think it's been there for quite some time. Food City looks nicer than the Big City Supermarket, but perhaps not quite as nice as the typical Food Town. I'm sure the locals appreciate having something, but they probably preferred having a major chain like Kroger even if it was an ancient store.
There is also a Mi Tienda and the Fiesta on 59/69 which I believe you made a blog post some years ago. That may have been a decade ago actually! The neon still appears to be there though. But, yeah, that area really lacks the variety of grocers that we take for granted on the western half of Houston.
There used to be a supermarket around a decade ago called Foodland I think which used to be on Jensen near Tidwell in between Laura Koppe and Aldine Westfield, but it looks like that building is now empty. It has not managed to reach the Homestead Kmart levels of rot, but it might get there soon enough if it remains abandoned.
I wonder how the Kmart liquidation sale went given the circumstances. Surely some would-be bargain hunters who would visit these liquidation sales have stopped going out looking for bargains on non-essential items. That said, Kmart may have picked a good time to close that store. The border crossing may stay closed for a while even after the rest of businesses re-open slowly and I'm sure that Kmart got a pretty big chunk of business from international shoppers.
April 30th is when the current set of stay at home orders expires here locally and in other parts of the country, but those orders could get another extension depending on how things go. Even when things open again, I suspect citizens and businesses will be encouraged to do so in a limited fashion so there isn't another wave of infections which might cause another long shut down.
I wonder if Lampert is investing in plexiglass shields for Kmart and Sears employees at the few remaining non-liquidating stores. At least it should be pretty easy to practice social distancing at a Sears stores given their usual lack of crowds.
Hopefully the interior of the mall has not deteriorated so the building can be used if needed. I really hope that it doesn't come down to that, we have one of the largest medical centers in the USA here.
DeleteThe Food City is fairly small, I have been there a few times. The larger Fiesta and Mi Tienda near Little York are the best options for groceries in that area. There are a few closed grocery store anchors sitting in shopping centers as well in that area.
DeleteI read on the Sears Layoffs site that people were still buying non-essential items from Kmart stores because the essential items were mostly sold out. The McAllen Kmart did close a day early so I guess they were selling out as expected. I wonder if they had to increase the discounts though to meet the store closing deadline.
Sears coincidentally has the same target reopening date of April 30th. They were one of the last department stores to temporarily close for the outbreak. I doubt anything besides a few signs and tape lines for social distancing will show up at Sears/Kmart locations.
I think there needs to be less restrictions, way too many people have been laid off in the past month. The small government stimulus checks fall way short of what people need to ride out any kind of extended loss of income. Social distancing guidelines can be put into place rapidly in large stores, and smaller stores will need to limit the amount of people that can enter at one time.
The New York Times had an article they posted just today talking about the carnage in the department store industry. It seems that Neiman Marcus will probably file bankruptcy here very soon and JCPenney might only be a few weeks away from bankruptcy. The article can be viewed here.
DeleteThe article mentions that this is typically the time department stores order for the fall/Christmas season, but there's no money for orders with some of these chains. The ordering period for the key back to school season has probably passed, but I'm sure stores are very unsure of what to do with that because there may not even be a Back to School season. I'm sure these stores don't want to waste resources they really don't have and they're probably hoping for a decent Christmas season above all else at this point.
It sounds like Texas retailers might be able to re-open on a 'to go' basis, but some counties might even restrict that. Non-liquidating Sears locations should be equipped to handle drive-thru orders because they've had that technology for a few years now. That said, I'm not sure how much business Sears is going to do this way. If people are buying appliances and mattresses from Sears, they are probably doing so online and then the products can be delivered and installed just as they always have. I'd imagine things like BBQ pits and outdoor furniture are probably pretty hot sellers right now as people are stuck at home. Sears has emphasized these products in recent years, so that's good, but I'm guessing the people wanting to buy these things think of Home Depot, Lowe's, and Walmart first before they think of Sears and these stores have been open somewhat normally all along.
Even when stores are allowed to open normally, they are going to have some challenges. First, who knows how many of their former employees will even return. They should be able to find replacement workers if the original ones don't return, but they may need to be trained and such. Second, there is always the risk that the stores might close again if there is another wave of infections. Third, customers are going to be reluctant to shop even when the stores do re-open normally because of economic concerns and for fears of getting sick from being out in public. Department stores are particularly dependent on older customers and those might be the people most reluctant to go out to shop. Fourth, with the possibility/probability of workplaces moving more work online even after things return to normal, there will be less need for people to buy work clothing.
Yeah, that Food City seems more like the kind of store people go to when they don't feel like driving out to a more complete grocery store. Still, there is a demand for neighborhood grocers like that and they don't have much competition. Small, truly independent grocers like that are pretty rare on this side of town since we have so many established local, regional, and national chains. Still, stores like that can be interesting to document since they often have a retro experience.
Retail blogger Retail Retell posted a comment on this blog a few weeks ago and I've been checking out his blog since then. He posted a very interesting post which I'm linking here of a Walgreens in Mississippi which was a recent conversion from a Rite-Aid. It was probably something else before Rite-Aid and it has a very retro interior. Surprisingly, Walgreens kept many of the retro features even though it only became a Walgreens recently. Walgreens is usually quick to remodel their own stores so I'm not so sure why they kept this one kind of retro. I think you'll enjoy checking out the pictures of that store especially since it neighbors the area that your blog covers.
There are going to be huge challenges for retailers once things start returning to the new normal in a few weeks.
DeleteWhen Sears reopens, we will be down to 2 less locations. It seems that Sears pulled the plug at Willowbrook and Deerbrook on April 7th to these stores. It is sad that we will never get to step foot in these locations ever again. There will probably be more places that do not reopen.
There are definitely not enough smaller grocers these days. I would frequent one if there was one near me. The chains have wiped them out in most suburban areas of town.
Thanks for sending over the link I will check it out soon. This sounds like a very unique conversion. Usually Walgreens will build a new building, but the Rite Aid acquisition has given them some decent properties.
It appears that the Aldine Mail Route Food City might actually be part of the El Ahorro Supermarket chain in Houston. The owner of El Ahorro also owns La Michoacana. It seems that the Food City used to be part of the Davis Food City, a local chain of grocery stores. El Ahorro acquired some of the former Davis Food City stores in 2008. So, yeah, I suppose that Food City is indeed part of a local chain, albeit in a rather odd way. Perhaps El Ahorro still uses the Food City name since the store mostly targets English-speaking customers, but I don't know.
DeleteThis actually makes sense in some way because there is a very vintage grocery store on Hempstead Rd. and W. 43rd St. that used to be a Food City, but then it was converted into what it is now, an El Ahorro. I remember shopping at that grocery store in the 1980s when it was still a Food City and it was like walking into a 1950s-1960s grocery store back then. Based on the images of the inside of it now, it looks like El Ahorro has renovated it and it doesn't really look that vintage on the inside even though it looks vintage on the outside.
It'll be very sad if it is indeed true that the Willowbrook and Deerbrook Mall Sears are now closed for good. I suppose there is conflicting information about the Willowbrook store, but I would assume it's closed if the Deerbrook store is also closed. Although I did visit the Willowbrook Sears early on in the liquidation, I was hoping to visit it one last time and say goodbye, but I suppose the virus situation changed those plans. Oh well, at least you took some photos of the place so we'll always have that to help us remember the place.
I really can't explain why Walgreens left so many vintage aspects to that Mississippi store. It's not like they are even vintage Walgreens aspects. It was a very unusual move for Walgreens. Maybe they are evaluating how the store does and might close it or build a new store depending on how it does? I don't know, I suppose we can only guess. I think you'll find that it's even more vintage looking than the Lake Charles K&B turned Rite-Aid that you posted to the blog a few months ago.
I took a look in Google Maps at the Humble Walgreens across the street from Deerbrook Mall. This is the vintage one in the Conn's shopping center. There aren't many photos of the place, but I could tell some of the fixtures in the store are vintage, but renovated to look modern. I also noticed that the Google user rating for that store was around a 3.4-3.5. That's not very good, but that's actually quite good for a Walgreens or CVS. They usually get rotten ratings in the 2.7-3.1 range. Given all of that, there seems to be some appreciation for that location. That appreciation is probably not because it is vintage, but rather because the pharmacy is probably better run than the ones at other locations. If people remembered the shoddy Tozai electronics they bought at that store decades ago, they'd probably knock their ratings down a bit!
That is some interesting info. I always thought La Michoacana was its own chain. They have numerous locations all over Texas.
DeleteI was hoping that the liquidating stores were going to reopen after all Sears closed on April 7th. Willowbrook may have received all of the inventory from Deerbrook since it appears they closed early. On my last visit, Deerbrook had a lot of inventory and they were bringing in rugs.
That Walgreens appeared to have the elements of whatever chain it was before Rite Aid took over. Rite Aid took over a lot of chains in the Southeast including K&B. The interior looks like it is from the 1970's.
That Humble Walgreens is very small compared to their normal stores. The pharmacy always seems to have a few people at the counter so they must have a good following. They wouldn't get good marks for product selection. The Tozai stuff would give them a negative rating, lol.
That’s funny how the Deerbrook Sears had rugs. That’s what the Memorial City location had during the closing.
DeleteIf Wikipedia is correct, both La Michoacana and El Ahorro are owned by Rafael Ortega. I am not sure if the two chains have common management, but it seems Rafael Ortega has a pretty diverse chain of stores between those two brands and Food City as well. It seems Davis Food City no longer exists and the old Davis Food City stores are either El Ahorro or Food City stores except for one which was sold to the Sellers Bros. chain. The Aldine Mail Route store might be the only store left under the Food City banner, but I'm not sure.
DeleteI wouldn't be surprised if the Willowbrook Mall Sears does not open again at this point, but I suppose we'll have to see what happens. Perhaps it isn't a bad idea to consolidate all the inventory into one store so that one set of employees can operate the liquidation instead of two, but it probably would take a bit of effort to move everything for the sake of a liquidation.
I saw a list of malls which would have stores open for to-go purchases on the Channel 13 website. Not all the Houston area malls were on there, but most of them are. Deerbrook Mall will have Chipotle, Dick's Sporting Goods, GameStop, LensCrafters, and Southern Dental open for to-go sales and the latter two require appointments it seems. So, yeah, there aren't going to be very many stores doing business at this point.
It looks like Macy's will be offering to-go pick-up at The Woodlands Mall, but I don't see them being open anywhere else. It looks like Dillard's will have their Memorial City Mall store open for to-go pick-up. The Galleria has not announced which retailers will have to-go service so these stores might be open there as well. Granted, the Dillard's is technically not part of The Galleria officially. The list of open stores is here.
Yeah, I'm not sure which chain operated that Mississippi Walgreens before it was a Rite-Aid. That store is a real throwback though. It's really shocking to me to see a Walgreens look like that, but it is pretty neat.
I don't think there are two major retail chains who operate here in Houston who have lower Google ratings at each of their stores than Walgreens and CVS. These pharmacy chains really struggle with customer service and it seems the problems are usually at the pharmacy counter. Oddly, it seems like grocery store pharmacy desks do better jobs. The good news for Walgreens is that their Humble store does better than there other stores so maybe they should study to see what that store is doing differently than the other stores.
I don't know where they get them from. My theory is that there is some massive warehouse filled with these rugs that is owned by the liquidators. Everytime a department store closes, these rugs show up.
DeleteThere are a lot of Houston area grocers with Food in part of the name. Food City, Food Town, and Food Fair. I can't think of another Food City still open, but there may be more.
DeleteI am willing to bet that Pasadena and Shepherd Sears stores received the remaining inventory that did not sell at the liquidating stores. My last trip to Deerbrook was about a month before they were scheduled to close. I am guessing the store closed at least a week early. Each Sears/Kmart store had different people running the stores social media pages. The Facebook page of the Kmart in McAllen was still getting tons of updates all the way up until closing. The Deerbrook Sears Facebook had not been updated since last November.
There are not a lot of differences on the list as to what is currently open. Gamestop has been open the whole time, but for car deliveries only. Dicks has been open the whole time as well for car deliveries.
Some of the department store reopenings are not very appealing. Most items they sell qualify for free delivery, so unless you live close to those few stores, it is not worth the trouble.
I briefly worked at Walgreens years ago as a low level manager. Over 90% of our problems and complaints came from the pharmacy. The pharmacy runs separately from the store, but we had to help ring customers up or handle complaints if the pharmacy manager was not there. A lot of the problems are caused by insurance companies, but the employees get the anger from the customers. The pharmacies are just not set up for fast service and often run with 2 or 3 people to handle hundreds of prescriptions per shift. Any issue with an insurance company or doctor holds up the attention of at least one person, which has a domino effect of slowing down the lines. The drive through stores have 2 lines, but usually only 1 person is managing both lines so those move slower than they should. Maybe the ratings are better because the Humble Walgreens does not have a drive through, and receives less customer traffic.
I was looking at Google Maps and tried to search for Blockbuster and Sports Authority locations around Houston. Some results came up. They closed in both 2014 and 2016 respectively. The Willowbrook Walmart closed 2016, the same year as Sports Authority, but the Walmart doesn’t pop up at all when I search for it on Google Maps, but yet, Sports Authority pops up when I look it up on Google Maps. The only place I could find the former Walmart listed was on Yelp, Instagram, and FourSquare. There were a few news articles about the Walmart closing, but almost no pictures taken inside the store. Yelp, Instagram, and FourSquare have photos, but not good ones. If you have found pictures on the internet, it would be cool if you linked them.
DeleteFood City, Food Town, and Food Fair are all pretty common names for local/regional grocery stores elsewhere in the country. In fact, I made a recent reply to a post on the Albertsons Florida Blog about a grocery store in Florida called Foodtown. Anyway, according to my research for that reply, it came to my attention that Food Lion was once called Food Town. The name was only changed in 1983, about 10 years before they came to Houston, because the Food Town name limited their ability to grow into new markets where the Food Town name was already used by other grocers. Also, changing names from Food Town to Food Lion allowed them to change names while only changing two letters which helped save costs.
DeleteThere is a pretty large chain of grocery stores in the North Carolina/Tennessee region called Food City, but that is of course unaffiliated with the El Ahorro Food City/former Davis Food City chains in Houston. As for Food Fair, that's the name that the old Gerland's chain used here in Houston, but I don't know if there are any Food Fairs left in town. The one on FM 1960 and Ella was converted into a Food Town a few years ago, but I think Gerland's was already affiliated with Food Town at that point.
I think it would be a good idea for Sears to send their inventory to other remaining stores. Sears is surely facing an inventory and budget crunch right now and using inventory they already have at their remaining stores makes sense.
The Houston Chronicle posted a listing of stores at various malls open for to-go sales. Their list of stores open for business at Deerbrook Mall is a bit larger than the one on the Channel 13 website yesterday. A few more jewelry stores are open along with Shoe Dept. Encore and ThinkGeek. It's still a pretty short list of stores, but they do have more open stores than Willowbrook Mall and some other local malls. Most of the stores open for to-go sales at Baybrook Mall are stores in the new, powercenter part of the mall which have outdoor entrances anyway. Here's a link to the Chronicle list.
I looked up the Walgreens locations in the Humble and Atascocita area and the old Humble store is indeed one of the best rated ones in the area. The location at Beltway 8 and Wilson Rd. actually has a 4.3 rating which is pretty remarkable for a Walgreens. On the other end of the spectrum, the FM 1960 and W. Lake Houston Parkway Walgreens has a pathetic 1.8 rating.
That's some good inside information about why Walgreens and CVS struggles with customer service. It's tough that the pharmacies get a bad reputation when the problem might really be with the insurance companies and doctors. Maybe Walgreens and CVS needs more employees to help deal with the customer load. The drive throughs probably add to the strain on the employees. Perhaps the employees at grocery store pharmacies have less customers so it's easier for them to give better customer service. I know that Kmart's pharmacy did well at customer service rankings even in recent years, but I can't imagine Kmart pharmacies are/were as busy in decent years as a Walgreens or CVS.
I will keep a lookout for them. I have not seen any photos online from that store.
DeleteI also forgot about Food a Rama, and Food Basket. I think there is still a Food Fair in New Caney just to the North of me.
DeleteSears will not reopen their stores until the end of May from what I have been reading from employees. Maybe they will have some stores in Texas open faster.
The Walgreens with a bad rating is a 24 hour location. It has been a rough looking store for a while now as well. The Beltway 8 location is a decent store. I filled in a few times for that location and they had a really good manager. A lot of Walgreens store managers stay at the same location for years if they choose to. I have not worked for the company in over a decade so things may have changed in that aspect.
Kmart pharmacies never seemed to have lines. They also did not have any drive thru pharmacies that I know of. Even though getting in and out of a car takes time, the inside of a Walgreens usually is faster. Every now and then I have gotten stuck behind a slow customer though.
Do Walgreens and CVS have liquidation sales when they close? I think so because I was looking at images of recently closed locations and the shelves and registers were still there, but the products and signage were missing
DeleteYes they have certain products on sale when the stores close. It is only select items that are liquidated when those stores close. Products that are close to expiration, products that the nearby store has an excess inventory of, seasonal items, and foods will be liquidated. The most recent liquidation I went to was a Rite Aid. The Rite Aid branded items were being liquidated and certain product lines were as well. Most of the regular name brands were still full price. Usually they close the stores fairly quickly once the decision to close a Walgreens or CVS is made.
DeleteFoodarama is another common name for grocery stores which we have here in Houston. As far as I know, the only Foodarama I've been to in Houston is the Fuqua and Sabo store near Almeda Mall. If I remember correctly, that is in a former Randall's and it still had some vintage Randall's aspects during my visit or two to the store about five or six years ago.
DeleteIt was around that same time five or six years ago that I visited a Sellers Bros. store in that same area, I believe it was the Edgebrook and Hwy. 3 store, just for the sake of visiting some of these local Houston grocery chains which we don't have in my part of town. In some ways, Foodarama, Sellers Bros., and Food Town all have a sense of similarity to them. That's probably because they are all stocked by the same company, Grocers Supply Co., but I'm sure these local chains kind of copy techniques off one another since they fill similar niches.
I do remember there was a Food Basket off of I-45 in The Woodlands/Oak Ridge North pretty close to where The Woodlands Mall is. That was an old store, it was around back before the mall when there wasn't much around The Woodlands area. It seems that store is now under the Arlan's Market chain. Arlan's operates a handful of stores in the outermost regions of the Houston metro area like Galveston, Santa Fe, Seabrook, and obviously The Woodlands. They also have some other stores elsewhere in Texas, but I don't think I ever went there. I was tempted to stop at the Food Basket when I worked in The Woodlands, but I never did. I don't know if Food Basket is still around in the Houston area.
That's interesting that Sears will not re-open until the end of May. It seems several retailers are taking a wait-and-see approach to re-opening as I've heard that a number of chains and movie theaters have opted not to open right now and will wait until next week or even later than that. I suspect that some of these chains know that there won't be many shoppers right now and they can only allow 25% of the maximum number of shoppers anyway so maybe they figure opening right now would be a big money-losing operation. Perhaps they are waiting until there are more shoppers out to open. I've also heard that some stores are worried about liability concerns if someone gets sick in their stores and some are also working out the details on new sanitation standards. Perhaps some retailers will stay closed or operate with just to-go service until these issues are straightened out.
I suppose good management really does make a big difference with these Walgreens and CVS locations. Given that the Beltway Walgreens has good management and good reviews, one has to wonder why Walgreens has not tried to find similar managers for their other locations, but perhaps that is a task which is easier said than done.
I don't think I've ever used a drive-thru pharmacy. I don't like the idea of getting stuck in the car behind another customer or two who is taking way too long. I'm stuck in my car enough commuting to/from work, lol. Granted, I can see the appeal to those who don't want to unbuckle their kids of their car seats and such.
Kmart was our preferred pharmacy back in the prime days of Kmart's pharmacies and I don't remember there ever being a long line or wait there. I don't ever remember poor service at the Kmart pharmacy or at the Eckerd pharmacy which we would also use on occasion. Conversely, I cannot remember CVS ever getting a prescription right. But, yeah, Kmart ran a pretty good pharmacy operation. It's a shame that their pharmacies couldn't save the rest of the chain, but oh well. Kmart pharmacies used to give away free rulers in around the early 1990s and I probably have one or two of those somewhere. I should look to see if I can find one of them.
I think there was also a Foodarama on TC Jester south of 610 West. I have not been to the area in a while so I am not sure if it is still there. It was a small grocery store with about 10 aisles, very old school.
DeleteI used to go to Sellers Brothers and Food Town a lot when I lived in the Southeast part of town. You are right, they are very similar in product selections and even pricing.
I am curious to see how many people are going out to the few malls that are opening up this week. I doubt that most shops will open up, but mall management will eventually force inline stores to open or penalize them. Sears is the one retailer that I want to check out when they reopen, I think that time is limited for the company now.
Pharmacy drive thru's would be more successful if they ran the lanes like the banks run their multiple lanes. Most drive thru pharmacies also have only one or two lanes so they have to be moved fast or it defeats the purpose of even having the drive thru. I wonder if adding a couple of extra lanes and an extra pharmacy tech would help these lanes move faster. Walgreens, HEB, CVS, and Walmart all have the same slow service in the drive thru lanes unless you are the only car in line without issues.
A Kmart ruler in 2020 is an awesome souvenir. I wonder if any stores that closed had some to sell off. I know I have those Kmart Shoemart shoehorns that were from the 90's that they had for sale at the Lake Charles Kmart when they were closing. I can't say we ever used a Kmart pharmacy, but we did use Eckerd's a lot. I remember Eckerd's being the only 24 hour pharmacy close to me in Metairie, but one late night I had to wait over an hour for a prescription after going to the emergency room for an injury. K&B was a good pharmacy, but they were slow if you had to wait for a prescription.
Anyway, my old computer is now back to life. It will make things easier when I have time to create articles, and I can comment faster. Now if I could just have more free time, lol.
I’m glad you got your computer fixed. Apparently Food Lion used to be in Houston, but left because of bad meat. Here is the link https://houstonhistoricretail.com/grocery/food-lion/ When Payless ShoeSource was closing, I was so close to buying a metal shoe size measurer, but when I made my decision, the cashier said the store was closed for the day. I was standing in the store when I was deciding. It wasn’t the last day, but I never went back unfortunately.
DeleteFoodarama has a location in/near the Heights on TC Jester near where the old Kmart was that is now a Restaurant Depot or some other kind of restaurant supply store. I believe there was also a HEB Pantry store in that area which may or may not still be there. That Foodarama is on the smaller side like you say. I would say that between Foodarama, Food Town, and Sellers Bros., Foodarama's best locations are probably higher end than the best locations of the others. Still, there isn't a huge difference between them.
DeleteI looked through one drawer of office supplies to see if I could find the Kmart Pharmacy ruler and I did not, but I did find my box of Kmart brand chalk. That box is probably from around 1993 or so and would be a similar age as the Kmart ruler. It has a slogan on the top of the box, "Kmart is the creative place." Of course, that is a twist on the old slogan that Kmart was "The Savings Place." I may also have a Kmart paint stirring stick from the early 1990s in the garage somewhere, but that won't be so easy to find so I'm not even going to bother looking for it because I don't even know for sure if I have it still.
A Kmart shoehorn is an interesting find. Is it from recent times or is it a vintage item? Was it something they sold, gave to customers, or used as an in-store item to help people try on shoes?
I have a family member who has a sewing box full of spools of Kmart brand thread which is almost certainly from the 1970s. They may even be from the early 1970s at that. Some of them still have the SS Kresge logo on them that Kmart had of their branded items in the early days. I'll have to see if I can get some of those as they are obviously nearly 50 years old at this point. The same family member has a Sears brand sewing machine which is nearly the same age or even older. It still works as far as I know.
Prescriptions can take a while to fill if the doctor has not called the order in ahead of time. I'd imagine that it might take even longer at a 24 hour pharmacy because the staff is probably very thin at that time, but hopefully there aren't a lot of customers at that time.
Pharmacies are going to have to get their drive-thru lines figured out because I'm guessing they're going to be used a lot more in the near future. It used to not be a big deal, but now there is a lot of pressure for sick people to stay as far away from others as possible. Even people who cough a lot without being sick might feel pressured to use drive-thrus. I can see the drive-thru pharmacy lines being long this fall/winter during flu season.
Mall operators are usually very strict at mandating that stores keep the same hours as the mall, but I'm guessing they're going to have be more flexible than usual. I think any tenant that manages to make rent on time should be considered a good tenant at this point. One problem mall type stores have is that they are small locations and so the employees have to be close together. If one employee gets sick, it's quite possible that a large number of a store's employees may have to self-quarantine and that might cause a particular location to have to close for a couple of weeks. I know a few fast food locations have had this problem.
You're right that Sears is almost certainly on limited time now. It's worth checking out their remaining stores while you can. The same can be said for just about all of the department store chains though. It's a very sad situation for them.
I'm glad to hear your computer is back in business. Hopefully you'll have some time this summer to get some new blog posts up from the places you've already photographed. I don't know if the numbers show this, but it seems like there's been a lot more interest in the blog so far this year than in recent years past so hopefully that is keeping the motivation up to keep the blog going.
Bad meat is a huge issue for a grocer to have. Fresh foods are the difference maker for grocery stores in my opinion.
DeleteYou have to take advantage of the store closing sales quickly. The last Kmart I went to had some hand baskets for sale. It was the only time that I went to a Kmart where the liquidator put those up for sale. I made sure to give a couple of those baskets a good home.
That is an interesting area of retail at that TC Jester corner. I had a brief job at the Antones just down the street so I had to go to that Foodarama a handful of times to pick up ingredients when we ran out. I did not know the Restaurant supply place was a former Kmart. Next time I am in the area, I will have to take a good look at the building. The HEB, is a small building with tall ceilings warehouse style. It is like their Mi Tienda stores in product selection.
DeleteI am not sure what they used the shoehorn for. I guess it was a promotional item for their revamped shoe department in the 90's. They only had three in a box full of plain shoehorns. I have come across a lot of items at those sales, I have a box of Kmart and Sears brochures, and random items such as display signs from those stores. If I cam get one of the newer Sears making moments matter signs, it will make my collection complete. I also have some employee shirts from Sears and Kmart.
The Sears sewing machine still working is not a surprise. They really made things to last 50 years ago. Those older store branded items can be found from time to time at antique stores, but they will cost you.
To make matters worse for pharmacies, there is an anticipated medicine shortage over the next few months. Pharmacies will probably have some angry customers when medicines are out of stock. The good thing about the chains is that they can source medicines from other stores fairly quickly, but if there is a run on anything it will take a while to replace. Look at how many weeks it took stores to finally keep TP and paper towels in stock.
I didn't even think about the small spaces that mall stores have. Some of those stores are virtually impossible to keep employees and customers 6 feet apart at all times. Those enclosed flea markets have the same problem, very small spaces to move around. Walmart has been making aisles one-way traffic only, but nobody is paying attention.
I may need to start documenting JCPenney stores. It sounds like the company is in a bad spot. I really hope the department stores can keep things together because the malls depend on them.
I uploaded photos last night to tackle some of my backlog. I just need to reorganize everything. Thankfully I did not lose any photos since I had just backed up my old computer before the hard drive failed. I have some Sears posts and another Mexican mall that are up next.
You’d think that since people are quarantined, and if they miss shopping, that they go to a retail blog such as this and look at the pictures to remind themselves of what shopping was like before the pandemic. I have actually been looking at the view counter on the right and since around February or March, and the views have been increasing every by at least 100-180 per day.
DeleteAs for Food Lion, I wouldn't say that they went out of business in Houston solely because of that meat story that ABC TV did about them, but that story certainly didn't help. It turns out that ABC more or less fabricated that story anyway, but that is a whole different issue.
DeleteThose Food Lion stores were never busy. There were times we would go there during the middle of the day and we'd be the only shoppers there or maybe there were one or two other shoppers. The stores were on the smaller side by the standards of newly-built early 1990s grocery stores (although they were bigger than the much more successful HEB Pantry Foods concept which opened at the same time), the stores were fairly plainly decorated and didn't have many amenities, and the prices were just average. The local Food Lion was on an intersection which had a Randall's and a then brand new Kroger Signature store (the latter is still around). The Food Lion just could not compete against those two. Food Lion entered the Houston market at around the same time as HEB Pantry Foods, but HEB had low prices which kept the customers coming in. Food Lion really had no advantages over their competitors other than maybe they offered a very quiet shopping experience.
Yes, that Restaurant Depot was most certainly an older billboard style facade Kmart store at one time. The Levcor website has before and after photos of their redevelopment of that Kmart at the bottom of this link. That was really not a great location for a Kmart and they closed just before the redevelopment of the Heights started. Oh well, I suppose that's just another case of bad timing and bad location planning on Kmart's part.
You're right that the pharmacies could have some serious customer service issues if they run out of medications in the next few months. I wonder what the pharmacies will do try to minimize disruptions for their customers. It might make sense for pharmacy chains to encourage mail-order filling for refills and less time sensitive prescriptions in order to help centralize inventory. The customers can then pick their already filled orders up in the store or have it mailed to their homes.
Yes, some retailers are going to have a difficult time dealing with the new realities. I'd imagine shoe salesman and suit salesmen are particularly at risk since they really can't socially distance themselves from their customers. Even otherwise, some small stores like the flea market stalls you mention are so small that it's hard to keep distance.
I heard about Walmart using one-way aisles, but I'm guessing it's hard to enforce that. I prefer to shop at grocery stores with less crowded stores (Food Lion would be helpful right about now, lol) even under normal circumstances, but this is especially true now. It's been quite a while since I've been to a Walmart and I'm guessing that won't change now. I think the last time I was in a Walmart was last June.
It's probably a good idea to start documenting any interesting JCPenney stores in the area. It seems almost certain that they will file for bankruptcy at some point this year. If they do, there's a good chance there will be some store closures. The whole chain could close depending on how the bankruptcy goes. I don't know if JCPenney will have any investors like Sears did with Lampert who will try to save the chain from liquidation during the bankruptcy. Of course, Lampert has nothing against liquidations, but he prefers slower ones that operate under his own terms.
I'm looking forward to these new posts. It's exciting to see the interest on the blog.
Whoops, I think I forgot to include the Levcor link to the Heights Kmart that I meant to put in the above reply. I'll include it here, sorry about that.
DeleteThe before and after pictures are at the bottom of that page.
YouTube retail channels are really popular right now too. Sal's Expedition log, Ace's Adventures, Doomie Grunt, UniComm productions, Wallie B26, Faded Commerce, Brick Immortar, John Cassity, and retailpocolypse are churning out videos weekly or more often. Friday night is especially busy when up to 6 people release videos one after the other.
DeleteIf you can’t see the link, here it is https://levcor.com/projects/heights-centre
DeleteIt sounds like Food Lion came into the market like Albertsons did. HEB has much better experience in Texas than most chains that have tried to expand here. I don't think there was a Food Lion in the Northeast side of town near me.
DeleteI took a look at the old Kmart before Restaurant Depot took over, they did a good job of mostly covering up the old store front. Kmart seemed to have a knack for bad locations, they were just not as aggressive as Walmart or Target with closing bad locations.
Just about every company has to change the way they do business. Most consumers have changed the way they shop during this mess. Sadly brick and mortar retailers have probably lost some customers for good, even though it is not their fault. It has been easier the past several weeks to order online and wait at home for most items except for the necessities.
I have been frequenting a Walmart neighborhood market close to me. They seem to keep things stocked much better than every other store in the area. There are not as many people going in there, so it seems to be safer. I thought the same thing about Randalls as you do with the Food Lion. Social distancing would be easy in the Randalls stores prior to the closing sales.
There are a few JCPenney stores worth documenting that I can think of. San Jacinto Mall, Meyerland Plaza, and the concept store in North East Mall near Dallas. The North East Mall store has an old school style cursive logo and vintage styled mall entrance. The rest of the store reminds me of what Sears tried at Gwinnett Place Mall a few years before that store closed.
No worries, it was easy to find on their website. Thanks for sending it over.
DeleteAlbertsons actually put in a better effort here in Houston than Food Lion did and that's really saying something! At least Albertson's had large stores with the amenities that customers were starting to expect grocery stores to have in the 1990s like video rental, a bank location, a pharmacy, and stuff like that. Maybe Food Lion had a pharmacy, but I don't think they even had that if I remember correctly. Unfortunately for Albertson's, their first wave of stores didn't have the same 'wow' factor as the Kroger Signature stores which were opening at around the same time, but at least they had more or less the same features. Food Lion just couldn't compete in that regard and they didn't have the kind of low prices which might help drive traffic even with the lack of amenities.
DeleteHEB entered the Houston market at around the same time as Food Lion with their very small HEB Pantry Foods stores. I'm sure you remember those, they were all over town. Although the Pantry Foods concept didn't stick around for very long (a few of those stores still exist as regular, but small HEB stores), the stores were still popular because they had low prices and that helped establish the HEB brand here in Houston. Also, HEB had a better understanding of what Texas shoppers wanted.
I'm not sure if Food Lion had any locations in NE Houston. Given the list of stores on the Houston Historic Retail blog, I'm guessing they didn't. I know Food Lion planned on opening more stores in Houston, but it was clear pretty early on that their stores were a failure so perhaps they stopped building new stores. The two Food Lions in this area, the Jones Rd. and West Rd. location which is now Food Town and the Veterans Memorial location which is now a Hong Kong Food Market, were both newly built stores and both still have Food Lion-like interiors to this day. The Hong Kong Food market is obviously a niche store, but if you want to get a taste of what Food Lion stores were like, I'd visit the Jones Rd. Food Town. That Food Town is also not very busy due to the stiff competition from Kroger, Aldi, and HEB at that intersection, but it's busier than Food Lion was. That Food Town was busier before HEB opened.
You're right that Kmart had some truly horrible locations in Houston. Perhaps they just misjudged trends in this market, but I suppose that is easy to say in retrospect. I don't blame them for thinking that the 1960 and Kuykendahl location was a good spot, but that just never worked out. The 149/249 & Bammel North Houston Kmart location was truly dreadful. They had problems filling that abandoned store/shopping center with even tier D stores after Kmart left it. Walmart is making that area work now, but that's a relatively new store and that area has probably only become viable in the last few years. Even then, I don't think that Wal-Mart is as busy as others based on what I've seen from their parking lot when I drive by it. The Homestead and Little York Kmarts might have seemed like good ideas when those stores opened around 50 years ago, but they quickly turned into poor locations. Wal-Mart came to Houston much later than Kmart did, but even the long-closed original Wal-Mart locations in Houston are in areas that are still generally viable for retail. Wal-Mart seems more skilled at picking locations that will be winners for decades even if they don't always keep their stores for that long.
All that said, the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market near me, which closed a couple years back, was a poor location. That store never did well and I think I only went in it once. If one wanted to social distance at a Wal-Mart, that would have been the perfect location, but it's gone now. Perhaps some Neighborhood Markets do well, but it seems like Walmart doesn't have a great batting average with those.
That's a good list of JCPenney stores to document. I'm not sure if JCPenney has any more of those very small stores in small towns in this area.
That cemetery near the Kmart you linked was definitely creepy.
DeleteI remember the Albertsons stores being somewhat bland. They did offer the one-stop shop amenities as you mentioned. A few former grocery stores were converted over like the Kingwood location. HEB took over the Albertsons after they closed in the mid 2000's.
There are not a lot of small HEB's left in the area. I went to a handful of the older locations when they were still relatively new in the Houston area. It sounds like a lot of the smaller grocers don't make significant changes to the interior of the stores they take over.
Kmart gambled on the inner city locations that Walmart and Target did not go for. They did pick some up and coming neighborhoods that faded fast as the suburbs continued to grow outwards. If Kmart had replaced these locations faster, they may not have run into money issues in the late 90's. A lot of those locations closed in the bankruptcy or before. I think Kmart left a lot of good areas when they went bankrupt in the early 2000's that should have been kept open. In hindsight we can say this in 2020.
Walmart closed off all of their small locations and a bunch of the Neighborhood Markets. A lot of those locations were just terrible, like the one near you.
JCPenney still has old school locations in Huntsville, Port Arthur, College Station, Lake and Jackson with the mirrored glass mall entrances. The Beaumont JCPenney is an older location with an unusual exterior. A little bit further out in Waco and Kileen are where JCPenney mirrored glass entrances also still exist. The Longview JCPenney has the orange/red tiled exterior. There are several that I could cover again, but the interior of most of those stores has been remodeled.
DeleteWhere was the Spring Branch Kmart? I read on Wikipedia that it was where Houston Community College (HCC) is now, near the Sam’s Club on Beltway 8 and I-10. Is that where it was?
DeleteThe first wave of Albertsons stores in Houston were indeed rather bland looking. They had interiors that were mostly white and grey. I'm not entirely sure why Albertson's decided to go with that look because by the time they started building those, Kroger already had their fancy Signature stores for a couple of years and Randall's had nicer looking stores going back to the 1980s. Albertson's might have been a bit slow realizing the need for fancier looking stores, but they did pick up on it eventually with the last generation of stores they had here in Houston before they left. In fact, the Albertson's closest to me opened with a fairly large, newly built store in 1995 or 1996 and was already replaced by a much fancier location in 2000 or 2001. The second location even had a garden center like a Kmart.
DeleteMany Albertsons stores became Krogers, HEBs, or Food Towns. Kroger tended to keep the Albertson's layout in the stores they took over which is usually what Kroger does when they take over a used grocery store location. In addition to the HEB you mention, the Spring Branch and Clear Lake Bay Area Blvd. HEBs are also in former Albertson's, but I've never been to an HEB which was an Albertson's so I really can't comment on how they look aside from what I've seen in photos.
The Food Towns in former Albertson's locations are the most interesting because Food Town really kept many Albertson's aspects around. The New Caney and Copperfield Food Towns look just like first wave Albertson's. The department signage is even the same, but they did change the colors to Food Town's colors. The Beltway 8 and Veterans Memorial Food Town, which is in an Albertson's that had the newer, fancier Albertson's design, is a real treat. It might be something worth putting on the blog if you ever have a chance. I think they even still have the old Albertson's Beverage Blvd. sign in the soft drinks aisle. It's a rare upscale looking Food Town, but all the upscale aspects were actually from Albertson's.
You're absolutely right that Kmart had a lot of locations in inner-ring suburbs which quickly went downhill. It's hard to say whether Kmart ever should have opened some of those locations. It's easy to say now that they shouldn't have, but we know how things played out and Kmart didn't have that benefit at the time. Still, as you say, some of those struggling locations should have been replaced with newer stores earlier than they were. Some of those locations should have been relocated in the early 1980s, but they weren't until the 1990s...the late 1990s in some cases. Even then, some of the ex-Venture locations Kmart moved into were not ideal either.
Kmart did have some good locations in the late 1990s/early 2000s, but those were mostly newer locations and/or ex-Venture locations and I'm guessing Kmart had a lot of debt from building/acquiring those locations which they wished to free themselves of in bankruptcy. Of course, some of those stores in good locations did poorly because of Kmart's general malaise during that time which led to the 2002 bankruptcy. In some ways, Kmarts of the late 1990s were even more poorly run than Lampert's Kmarts were in the late 2000s/early 2010s if that can be believed. I was a loyal Kmart shopper, but even my experiences at the newer Kmart locations in the late 1990s/very early 2000s were rather depressing and there were many customer service issues during that time.
Those JCPenney locations you list are certainly on the smaller side, but I wonder if they have any stores left like the one in Brenham which closed a few years ago. That was a really small location. That was almost like a Palais Royal/Stage location. At least it appeared that way, I never actually shopped there.
I didn't even notice that Albertsons was here in the 90's. I thought they arrived at the dawn of the new millennium. I guess I didn't pay much attention back then to grocery stores outside of my little corner of the world. A grocery store with a garden center is different, I can't say that I have ever seen one.
DeleteI know exactly where that Veterans Memorial Food City is at. The one near me in New Caney has the same exterior design as that store. I wonder if it has an old elements of Alberstons still remaining.
That Venture acquisition was a terrible investment for Kmart. There was a reason that company was failing, location placement had a lot to do with their troubles back then. I wonder of any of those old Venture stores exist as a flea market or thrift store with the design elements still in place. Venture had some cool looking stores.
I know the JCPenney West Hills Mall store in Huntsville is not much bigger than the Brenham location. It has the old carpet of the 80's in some parts of the store as well as the mirrored glass mall entrance. The rest of the stores I mentioned are larger. The Lufkin JCPenney is also on the small side, but it was renovated substantially years ago.
The Spring Branch Kmart was located on Long Point Road in between Pech St. and Hillendahl. That Houston Community College location off of I-10 and the Beltway was a former Kmart location in a way, but not really. That used to be a Builders Square store which was a hardware store chain owned by Kmart.
DeleteThe Beltway 8 & Veterans Memorial and the New Caney Food Towns do indeed have similar looking exteriors, but the interiors of the two stores are completely different. The New Caney store has the first wave Albertson's interior that most Houston area Albertson's had, but the Beltway store has a much fancier design that Albertson's was using in the last year or two before they gave up on the Houston market. Both stores still very much look like Albertson's on the inside. The New Caney store still has Albertson's department signage along the walls and such. The Beltway store even has the famous old Beverage Blvd. sign that Albertson's used to use in their soft drink aisle.
Pseudo3D did a post some years back about the ex-Albertson's-turned-Kroger that had the Albertson's Garden Center. His post shows the exterior part of the garden center, but there was an interior part that was separate from the rest of the store that looks like those old Kmart garden centers. It was indeed quite odd. Kroger doesn't use any of that garden center part though.
I think it was a mistake for Kmart to pick up all those Venture stores. Some of those were good locations, but a lot of those Venture locations were rather mediocre. It probably would have been better if Kmart picked up a handful of good Venture locations and skipped the mediocre ones.
I'm not aware of any ex-Venture stores in Houston which still have Venture/Kmart interiors, but maybe some exist out there. I certainly have not visited all of those locations. There was briefly a thrift store called Epic that was in part of the old FM 1960 & I-45 Venture/Kmart, but the old interior was removed from that. That thrift store had some interesting electronics, but I never did buy any electronics from there during the brief time it was open. I did buy a great Madonna audio cassette from there though, lol.
There was a Kmart in a 1990s ex-Venture in Iowa that looked just like our Kmarts that were in Ventures. Fortunately, the pictures of that are still up. You can see them here. It seems that Kmart closed in 2014.
What Ex-Venture locations that Kmart took over were mediocre or bad? I would think that it would be a good idea, especially back then, when Kmart sold more food.
DeleteThe only Venture I visited was the FM 1960 near I-45 location. It was not a very inviting place when it was Venture, but I never went back for the short time it was a Kmart. Maybe our blog readers can help.
DeleteI went to the FM 1960 and I-45 location when it was both Venture and Kmart. I would list that location as being one of the mediocre locations. It wasn't a bad location for a discount store, but it wasn't a good location either as witnessed by the other retailers who have come and gone from that location over the years. I think if Kmart was going to spend money opening a new location, they should have picked a better location than that one.
DeleteThe Venture/Kmart on 290 was also a mediocre location. I went to that location both as a Venture and a Kmart as well. The other retailers who moved into that location did not have much success. It's really not a great location for a discount store. The location where the Wal-Mart and Target are seems to have more success, but the mere presence of Wal-Mart and Target might make it more successful. Anyway, Kmart's original location closer to the Loop seems to have been the better location so it was probably a mistake to move from it to the ex-Venture. It looks like Burlington is dumping that location in that ex-Venture shopping center to move closer to the Loop on 290 with that new powercenter that is being built.
Even the Willowbrook Kmart location was not the best location for access. At the time it opened, construction was going on to make that FM 1960 underpass. That made it a bit difficult to get to and it wasn't really easy (and still isn't) to head westbound on FM 1960 when leaving that shopping center. Also, for those using the underpass, they wouldn't even see the Kmart at that location. It's not a necessarily a bad location, but it has some access challenges.
One odd thing about the Willowbrook Venture and Kmart is that it didn't have a cafeteria even though other Venture/Kmarts in ex-Ventures did. I never could explain that. Anyway, none of the Ventures had garden centers AFAIK so Kmart had to sacrifice those when they moved to those locations. They often tried to make makeshift garden centers by stacking plants in the front of the store are in the parking lot.
The decision to move the Texas City Kmart to the ex-Venture/Wal-Mart/Woolco across the street was a rather odd decision. I think they would have been better off keeping the original Kmart where it was and then opening a new location in League City somewhere since that is where the growth was/is in that area.
The ex-Venture stores were bigger than most of the vintage Kmarts they replaced, but Kmart implemented the Big Kmart format in those vintage Kmarts elsewhere in the country. It's not like Kmart didn't have pantry food even before the Big Kmart transition.
Thanks for the comment, I only went to that one Venture a couple of times. I should have made more of an effort to visit those stores, but at the time we did not think Kmart was on the verge of leaving Houston entirely.
DeleteThere was a question in this discussion quite some time ago about the former Memorial City Mall area Target that existed before Target moved to the mall on land where the Montgomery Ward once was. The old Target was one of the original ones in Houston and was quite a large building. Well, it turns out that the Levcor website has a photo of the old Target. The photo is towards the bottom of this link. As you can see, it looked somewhat similar to the Almeda Mall Target, which isn't a surprise, and it also had a Marshall's as a neighbor in what was probably an old Target grocery store. Of course, that now redeveloped shopping center still has Marshall's as an anchor along with OfficeMax and others. I'm glad I was able to find a photo of that old Target. I drove by there quite a bit and probably shopped there more than a few times a long time ago, but I really couldn't remember exactly what it looked like.
DeleteAlso, the Levcor website has some old photos of the Copperfield Kroger shopping center. The Kroger is still there, but the Greenhouse design that is in the old photos is now gone. There is also a great photo of the outside of the Eckerd that was in that shopping center which is now a salon center. The Loew's Theater is now a Studio Movie Grill. That shopping center looks quite different now so it's great seeing those old photos. I'm guessing the photos at the bottom of the page are from around 2002-2004 and the black and white photo up at the top is from the 1990s. That shopping center is near me and I surely shopped at that Eckerd some so it's great to see it. I know for sure that I went to the Loew's Theater and I still shop at the Kroger there occasionally. Here's the link to that shopping center.
The Levcor site has so many retro photos. I hope they keep their website as-is. Thanks for sending over the links, now I need to see what else they have on their site.
DeleteI found out something related to Target Garden Centers today. I was looking at Google Maps and concluded that the only Target locations that had old garden centers were ones in California and Florida. Maybe they had them there because of the sunlight.
DeleteThat is a really interesting find. Both of those states are about as far away from the Target main office as you can be in the lower 48 of the US. You make a good point, both of those states have fairly stable warm weather that a Garden Center could be used year round.
DeleteThe former Sports Authority near Willowbrook is being redeveloped into a thrift store. I drove past a couple of months ago and I saw a sign for the new store. The next week after that, the sign was gone, so I don’t know if it was halted, or if it just blew away. This was sometime in the late summer/early fall.
ReplyDeleteI noticed the lights were on at the property around a couple of months ago. I figured something was going on with the building. It would be cool, if they left the old sports photos up inside of the store. The Humble Sports Authority was completely gutted out for a World Market and Buy Buy Baby store. Both of those stores were vintage Oshman's locations that had very little in the way of remodels over the years.
DeleteI drove around FM 1960 in front of the old Sports Authority maybe in January or February and I did see construction work going on inside. I had no idea they were going to convert it to a thrift store though. I wonder if they are done and if the thrift store opened. Maybe the plans didn't work out given the current situation, I don't know. I suppose we'll have to find out when things return to normal.
DeleteThat location started out as an Oshman's Super Sports, but it opened a few years after the former Memorial City Mall area location.
I suspect thrift stores might become more popular again once things return to some level of normalcy since so many people are dealing with job losses or other losses of income. OTOH, people may be nervous buying used items and we know how people like to touch items on the shelves at thrift stores. I'm not sure what the prospects are for thrift stores.
If it does indeed turn into a thrift store, I'll probably check it out at some point. I don't shop at the thrifts as much as I used to mainly because I just don't have much more room for vintage electronics, but I've still found some interesting things in my limited visits in recent years.
That would be a great use for that building. That is a massive building right at the entryway to the Willowbrook commercial area.
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