EntertainMART/Hastings Kerrville Texas October 2020

As I thin out my older photo posts, here is another one from a few years ago. This is the EntertainMART in Downtown Kerrville Texas as seen in October 2020. As you can see right off of the bat, this location was a former Hastings and has a lot of the fixtures still in place. This is the proper way to repurpose a store while keeping the history of the previous retailer intact. Vintage Stock and EntertainMART have taken over a few former Hastings locations, but they have yet to expand to the Houston area at this time. They are close with a location in College Station at Post Oak Mall. 

Let's go inside, shall we?

Most of the old fixtures from Hastings were still intact. 

Game consoles in 2020. I was surprised to see Nintendo Switches for sale. They were still pretty hard to find in late 2020.

More fixtures still intact like the video sign.

Middle of the store to the front checkouts.

Remember all of those video game collectible characters that Toys R Us had on clearance a couple of years before my visit? Chances are that some of these are from those sales. Second hand retailers still have tons of these lying around.

Retro games!

The checkout counters still had the old Hastings logos on the lights.

I am pretty sure that the Hardback cafe signage is left over from Hastings as well. I didn't go inside to see the menus, but they were open and serving drinks.

Now here is where things get interesting. 

You may remember seeing this lady in the Hastings ads at other stores. Here she is actually holding a Entertainmart gift card instead of a Hastings certificate. It is pretty funny that they kept this up like this.

Another station with vintage Hastings signage.

These abstract drawings were part of the late 80's early 90's Hastings design as well.

The old Hastings slogan was still up as well.

The back aisles of the store.

Another view of the vintage signage. The Pulp Fiction poster may have been recently added.

The only part of the store that was really different from the Hastings days. These pegboard walls usually showcased T-shirts and musical instruments depending on the store.

Hastings or Entertainmart? The concepts are so similar you sometimes you forget it is not Hastings anymore.

The video selection was lighter than it was in the past. Stores like this one have a tendency to start out like this and accumulate a lot of inventory in the future.

The rest of the store had a good amount of stock. Hastings did have a lot more product lines than Entertainmart carries.

The back wall of the store.

More of the abstract characters from the Hastings era can be seen all over the upper walls.

The toy selection.

The one cool thing that Entertainmart kept going at least here is the rental of games and movies.

Collectibles and toys.

There is a huge book selection that we touched on earlier, but here it is pretty much all the way across the store length.

Board games and videos in the background.

The music and instrument selection.

The Hastings music signage is intact here as well.

As you can see there was a lot of music CD's to choose from.

The music instrument selection was a bit bare. 

The t-shirt racks, I am not sure if these were from the Hastings era or new fixtures. I had not visited this store previously.

Now for some close-ups of the video selection. Some were only up to rent and others to buy or rent.

I do miss rental stores, they are so rare to find these days. Unfortunately, we were just visiting for the day so we did not rent anything. 

Vinyl records.

Up front they had this section of collectibles. Swords, video games, cars, cards, and a lot more random stuff can be found here.

Here is the road sign.

I hope you enjoyed this trip, more to come.

 

RIP Hastings Conroe Texas

As I post this, I pray for the safety of all of my family, friends, and blog readers during the terrible weather events unfolding all across South, East, and Central Texas and Southwest Louisiana.

Here is the final Hastings I documented during their final days of business in 2016. This was the closest store to where I live, so I spent a good amount of time here over the years. 

There is not much to say about this location that has not already been said. This location was in a former Randall's that moved from a different location in the city.

We will start with photos from the beginning of the sale. 

These two look like they accidentally clicked on two girls one cup for the first time, lol.

Fast forward to about a month into the sale. Junk from other clearance sales was brought into the store including the Blockbuster movie grab boxes.

The last round of new release music that Hastings ever received.

Each Hastings store I visited had several of these during the liquidation sale. I wonder how many of these were sitting around collecting dust in the US.

The Hardback Café was a decent place to sit back and chill. A few locations had drive throughs.

The magazine racks were mostly empty at this point. They later filled these shelves with Prince and Elvis tribute items.

The store did not look too bad in this photo, the Blockbuster box almost looks like it should be there normally. 

Here we fast forward a couple weeks later. Discounts were deeper and as you can see in the first few pictures stuff from other closeouts was brought in to sell.

Steering wheel covers?

Additional sporting goods items which I suspected were from Sports Authority closings.

Sports Authority was in the final month in their going out of business sales when Hastings started their own closing sales.  

Baby and kids clothes?

Tons of socks and boxers on this aisle, same brand as they had at the Sports Authority stores.

A little later on in the sale, we can see the store is getting emptier. 

Near the store entrance, the overhead sign helped you to see what side of the store these items were located. 

Caption this photo, what are they laughing at so hard?

Here is the roadsign on I-45 with Radio Shack, Sears, Hastings all in the same shopping center does not bode well. The Sears is a small appliance store. 

October 16- final two weeks of the sale. Backpacks and random junk that was brought in for the sale were still plentiful. Discounts of 60-90% off at this point.

This whole section of the store had been cleared out, but lots of CD's, books and movies were still left. Some collectables were still left as well.

October 20- Last 9 days of the sale. As you can see from my last pictures, the store was getting cleaned out rapidly except for movies, books, and CD's. The discounts were 70-90% off.

October 29, 2016 the final day in the last hour of business. The deal at the end of the day was fill a large garbage bag of anything left in the store for $20. A bunch of movies and books were still left over, I found a few CD's as well. 

While I was there an argument broke out when a lady started picking through items another customer had stacked up to buy. Once he saw her and said those were his things, she got mad and threw items on the floor and was kicked out by an employee. It all happened so fast I did not record the incident.

RIP Hastings October 29, 2016.