DFW Kroger News/Observations

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Re: DFW Kroger News/Observations

Post by architect »

SamSpade wrote:
architect wrote:Don't worry, I'm definitely not dissing the Longview store! I was actually working occasionally in Longview about a year ago and made a point to stop there every time I was in town (I was living in Tyler at the time). It's really a nice store after the recent renovation, and is impressive just based on the history alone and the fact that it still draws excellent traffic despite its age and location (considering Longview is primarily growing to the north). I hope that the upcoming Marketplace doesn't impact the former Family Center too badly. Honestly, I feel that the store that will be most left out in this situation will be the remaining Albertsons in Longview, considering that the store is old, has terrible pricing, and is the closest store to the future Marketplace. Also, I'm still hoping that Kroger decides to try for round 2 in Tyler with a Marketplace store, though I do not expect that to happen in my lifetime. Brookshires, although an excellent company, desperately needs some competition around here.
All seconded.

I was in Tyler for work reasons and honestly, I tried Brookshires (a few locations), FRESH, and Super 1 (which was hotel adjacent). Other than the Super 1, I was just kind of "eh" about Brook-shur's ;-). I really disliked that the deli and meat counter were adjacent in the store, I don't like to think about raw and prepared foods being so close - but the staff level was good and the employees all more than willing to help. FRESH was a nice enough store but it's freaking out in the boondocks. The food I got for the "protein + 2 sides" that seems to be the new supermarket staple was high quality but cost a few dollars more than most grocers.

The Longview Kroger made me feel back at home except for the low-quality looking deli counter. I bought a few seasonal sugar cookies for Memorial Day before heading back to Tyler. This store also has a fuel center crammed into the lot.

By your description, I'm assuming that you were staying at the Hampton Inn at Cumberland Park? If so, the Super 1 you visited is brand new, having opened in the last year and is overall a very nice store (though the prices are barely lower than a traditional Brookshires store). Most of the national retail in Tyler is situated around Loop 323 and along the Broadway (69) corridor. However, the Old Jacksonville corridor where Fresh is located is actually growing into a major commercial corridor in its own right; it is just still in the process of being built out. Many of the nicest neighborhoods in Tyler are located in this area, hence the location. The Rice Road Brookshires is also a major south Tyler destination; it is a long-running store which is considered the company's flagship. When it first opened, this store was smaller than it is now; there was originally an Eckerd pharmacy in the area where the produce/bakery/deli are presently located. In the mid-1990's, Eckerd moved across Broadway (to the current CVS location) and Brookshires expanded into their space (I still remember this renovation from when I was younger). Then, this past year, Brookshires renovated this store again, revamping the decor and adding brighter lighting in many areas. The Roseland (Bergfeld Center) Brookshires in Tyler has also been extensively renovated over the past couple of years; prior to its renovation, it was another long-running store which was clearly in need of an update. Overall, Brookshires knows how to run their stores well, their prices are just simply too high on many products, especially in Tyler where they have a virtual monopoly (DFW-area Brookshires pricing is much more competitive).
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Re: DFW Kroger News/Observations

Post by architect »

A couple of recent Kroger happenings around DFW:

Recently, the Kroger in Highland Village on Justin Road (near Flower Mound) quietly closed. This closure has been speculated for some time, as when the Lewisville Kroger closed in 2015, multiple employees at that locations stated that the Highland Village store was also underperforming. In addition, the opening of a Kroger Marketplace store to the west on Justin Road in the last couple of years likely sealed the deal. The Highland Village store was noticeably smaller than many Kroger stores in the DFW area, but was still well-maintained and is located in an affluent area. It also managed to defeat an early-2000's Albertsons across the street (now the flagship campus for The Village Church), leaving the only competition nearby as a Randall's-era Tom Thumb. Interestingly, media reports stated that Kroger opened this store in 2001, so I am curious as to what operated in this space prior to that point (the facility is clearly older than the early 2000's. Pictures for this store can be found on the Google link below.

News Article: http://www.crosstimbersgazette.com/2016 ... age-store/
Photos: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kroge ... !1e1?hl=en

Also, Kroger has altered its plans for a new store on the east end of Downtown Dallas. Last year, the submitted plans to the city detailing a stand-alone, urban format store for a property on Hall Street. Now, Kroger has teamed up with a local apartment developer to add apartments to the project. This looks like it could be quite an interesting project!

http://www.dallasnews.com/business/real ... own-dallas
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Re: DFW Kroger News/Observations

Post by pseudo3d »

The Kroger appears in aerial shots as of 2001 but not 1995. I'm certain it was built as Kroger, barring some freak circumstance like it was originally a Winn-Dixie. But it was 60k square feet, and I don't think Winn-Dixie ever built that big.
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Re: DFW Kroger News/Observations

Post by storewanderer »

The floor in the closing store should tell us what it was. Isn't that a Winn Dixie floor?

Also, the department store like lighting around the perimeter?
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Re: DFW Kroger News/Observations

Post by wnetmacman »

storewanderer wrote:The floor in the closing store should tell us what it was. Isn't that a Winn Dixie floor?

Also, the department store like lighting around the perimeter?
That isn't a WD floor. Most of the TX stores were very standard, non-adventurous stores for them. Straight, non-angled tiles. Not overdone; the last Marketplace decor. There would have been a runway in white with green and pink boxes like this:
wdmkt.jpg
My bet is on Albertsons or something similar. Looks more like that to me.
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Re: DFW Kroger News/Observations

Post by pseudo3d »

wnetmacman wrote:
storewanderer wrote:The floor in the closing store should tell us what it was. Isn't that a Winn Dixie floor?

Also, the department store like lighting around the perimeter?
That isn't a WD floor. Most of the TX stores were very standard, non-adventurous stores for them. Straight, non-angled tiles. Not overdone; the last Marketplace decor. There would have been a runway in white with green and pink boxes like this:

wdmkt.jpg

My bet is on Albertsons or something similar. Looks more like that to me.
Nope, definitely a Kroger. It is the orange and green Millennium Décor package, which can be seen here as a new-build, and in the yucky Southwest Parkway store in College Station as a cheap remodel.
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Re: DFW Kroger News/Observations

Post by architect »

pseudo3d wrote:
wnetmacman wrote:
storewanderer wrote:The floor in the closing store should tell us what it was. Isn't that a Winn Dixie floor?

Also, the department store like lighting around the perimeter?
That isn't a WD floor. Most of the TX stores were very standard, non-adventurous stores for them. Straight, non-angled tiles. Not overdone; the last Marketplace decor. There would have been a runway in white with green and pink boxes like this:

wdmkt.jpg

My bet is on Albertsons or something similar. Looks more like that to me.
Nope, definitely a Kroger. It is the orange and green Millennium Décor package, which can be seen here as a new-build, and in the yucky Southwest Parkway store in College Station as a cheap remodel.
Actually, I'm thinking that this might have originally opened as a Winn-Dixie too. According to Denton CAD, this store was originally built in 1995, which would have been right in the middle of Winn-Dixie's DFW expansion. At the time, the only other grocers in the area would have been Tom Thumb (which was already building New-Generation stores as a standard feature) and Albertsons (which featured a distinctly different prototype in the mid-90's, typically with a single entrance and a low dropped ceiling). Also, the light channels used around the perimeter of this store match typical Winn-Dixie decor from the period. My guess is that when Kroger acquired this location, they extensively renovated it, thereby removing almost all traces of Winn-Dixie's former decor (including the flooring).
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Re: DFW Kroger News/Observations

Post by wnetmacman »

architect wrote:Actually, I'm thinking that this might have originally opened as a Winn-Dixie too.
I have to disagree for two very specific reasons:

1. During the 90's, WD only built stores with a few very specific prototypes, all of which had a single bank of doors in the middle, at different angles. This store was very specifically built with two entrances. WD just didn't do that at that time.
wdmdoor.jpg
2. In those eras of stores, they also stuck very stringently to floorplans, with NO variation. The back of each store was identical, with delivery doors in the center with a protruding area that typically had a higher roof for refrigeration equipment. Coolers were also mounted outside the store; this store has none. Here are two examples: the store we're discussing, and a typical WD of that era, which is now the Kroger on Belt Line Road in Addison.
krhv.jpg
krbl.jpg
You'll not the differences in layout and design. At the bottom left on the typical store are the outdoor coolers, a WD exclusive in Texas, even on stores they didn't build.
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Re: DFW Kroger News/Observations

Post by Bjindallas »

It was a Minyard (same concept as 122 and Preston and 14th and Jupiter).

http://m.supermarketnews.com/archive/mi ... ourt-order
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Re: DFW Kroger News/Observations

Post by pseudo3d »

architect wrote:
pseudo3d wrote:
wnetmacman wrote:
That isn't a WD floor. Most of the TX stores were very standard, non-adventurous stores for them. Straight, non-angled tiles. Not overdone; the last Marketplace decor. There would have been a runway in white with green and pink boxes like this:

wdmkt.jpg

My bet is on Albertsons or something similar. Looks more like that to me.
Nope, definitely a Kroger. It is the orange and green Millennium Décor package, which can be seen here as a new-build, and in the yucky Southwest Parkway store in College Station as a cheap remodel.
Actually, I'm thinking that this might have originally opened as a Winn-Dixie too. According to Denton CAD, this store was originally built in 1995, which would have been right in the middle of Winn-Dixie's DFW expansion. At the time, the only other grocers in the area would have been Tom Thumb (which was already building New-Generation stores as a standard feature) and Albertsons (which featured a distinctly different prototype in the mid-90's, typically with a single entrance and a low dropped ceiling). Also, the light channels used around the perimeter of this store match typical Winn-Dixie decor from the period. My guess is that when Kroger acquired this location, they extensively renovated it, thereby removing almost all traces of Winn-Dixie's former decor (including the flooring).
I'm sure that it was Kroger based on a couple of reasons.

1. In January 1995, there were absolutely no retail establishments at all on the road west of the tracks (east side of the tracks there was a Food Lion), with the only thing being an apartment complex at the northwest side of the intersection. Yeah, it's possible it opened later that year. But not only do CADs are unreliable on opening dates sometimes (don't mean to pry, but is it even the right address?), it doesn't mean logistical sense to open anything there. Justin Road is still two lanes (it would be underway to widening by 2001), and there were barely even any houses in the area. Nothing north of Valley Ridge, and that was a stub with a developing subdivision to the south. Kroger doesn't build in some unproven area and then hope that things shake out. My local 2000 Kroger (the one that DIDN'T close) was built at a time when the area was young (not much to the south), yes, but it had older houses to the northwest, a corridor that had already included things like a hospital, a park, and two schools, and to the east side was the freeway, whereas this Kroger would've had nothing in 1995.

2. So besides the "nothing there" fact tending to rule out supermarkets in general, I would argue against Winn-Dixie on the grounds that W-D's stores were not very large. The Kroger store was 60,000 square feet, which was about right for Kroger stores in the 1990s but Winn-Dixie I don't think ever really built that big. Nor any other store, if it was Minyard, it would've almost certainly kept on until 2004 when the chain was sold, and although Randalls built some questionable stores in the 1990s with an extremely short shelf life (2-5 years for a staggering number of cases considering the size of the chain), by that time, they had been sold to KKR (for funding purposes) which kept a shorter leash on stores that they could actually build.

3. Kroger would not change out a store's flooring that is only a few years old. Store flooring is one of the harder things to do and from what I've seen, Kroger rarely touches it. Sometimes they don't even alter existing décor--there's pictures of Kroger reusing Albertsons "Theme Park" décor out there...but not touching flooring is common. The former AppleTree in west Houston has this kind of pink/red tile running throughout that I'm sure isn't something Kroger put in, another Kroger in NW Houston has the old Albertsons trappings like the Beverage Boulevard "road" still intact, and probably other things I'm not mentioning.
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