Shortly before completing the update for September 1st, 2026, I was surprised to find my "H-E-B Stores in Houston" page had a surprisingly high SEO, which was bad in that case as I had effectively retired the page, and necessitating a change to a new format, deciding to focus on H-E-B Pantry at 5130 Cedar Street.
Anchoring a small strip center and opening April 1959 (just a few months before Weingarten's opened a block away), the first grocery store to occupy the spot was A&P, as the venerable "The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company" did operate stores as far west as Houston; however, in the 1970s the chain began to have issues as it was facing an aging workforce and thousands of obsolete stores. As the company attempted to combat these issues (and inflation) and by the time it closed in 1973 when it left the Houston market, was marketing its stores as A&P WEO (this didn't last long, within a few years it would be dropped). Gerland's Food Fair picked up the vacant store but it too closed in 1979, getting replaced with Academy in 1982. Academy didn't operate for very long before H-E-B bought the site in 1993, evicting Academy (I believe H-E-B bought the entire center) to open a 27k square foot H-E-B Pantry Foods (#352) store in April 1994 (the building was slightly expanded). By this time, Randalls had reopened the former Weingarten/Safeway/AppleTree across the street.
By the late 2000s, H-E-B had rebranded the store as simply H-E-B, and in the mid-2010s H-E-B's parent company announced the store (now known as simply H-E-B) would be replaced with a two-story location, and in 2016 the strip center was slowly cleared out for construction, with the new store opening June 2018 at 5106 Bissonnet Street (#738). It was Houston's first two-level H-E-B, similar to what would later be built at 2300 North Shepherd Drive.
Other stores in the strip before they were torn down included (from the H-E-B east): Thai Cottage (5124 Cedar), Domino's (5120 Bissonnet), Bouquelle Cleaners (5118 Bissonnet), The UPS Store (5116 Bissonnet; this has been here since 1994 as Mail Boxes Etc.), Nationwide Insurance (5114 Bissonnet), Hong Kong Chef (5112 Bissonnet; this had been here since 1970), Art Deco Hair Salon (5110 Bissonnet; this had been here since 1992), Rice Discount Liquor (5108-B Bissonnet), General Nutrition Center (5108 Bissonnet), and Jimmy John's (5106-A Bissonnet).working 6 days isn't enough, I wish I could work 7" probably isn't. This isn't a complete listing of what was previously here.
I personally visited this store when it was an H-E-B Pantry and while it wasn't the same as the H-E-B Pantry back home that was long-defunct, it did have nearby a hanging blinking four-way red light that was dismantled in 2019 at Cedar and 5th. This was the way, back home, how Holleman and Glade was arranged for many years (which, coincidentally, was also a few blocks from my hometown H-E-B Pantry store).
Regrettably, I have no pictures of either store in operation, hence the Google Earth aerial from the early to mid-2010s.
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