Food Lion Grocery Store At 9520 Jones Rd.

[SpaceGhost]

Howdy folks! So there's currently a grocery store at 9520 Jones Rd, Houston, TX 77065. It is presently a Food Town, but is document as previously operating as Food Lion #1311. (Btw here's the list of Food Lions I've found so far.) Checking out HCAD I noticed that the property was purchased in 1992 from Safeway of all companies! Checking out historic imagery on Google Earth I found that there was a grocery store across the street which turned out to be a Randalls built in '85, now an HEB. There wasn't anything on the corner that Safeway owned however.

 

So the question is, does anyone know if Safeway ever built there? The earliest images of any help are from 1989. So it's possible that a store was built after the image and torn down for Food Lion, or even remodeled. An interesting side-note is that this property was owned by Safeway long after Apple Tree had taken over.

[IronTiger]

Well, Safeway continued to own several sites after AppleTree spun off. I think I read that Safeway did end up giving most of the rest to AppleTree a few years later. My guess is that since I don't see that address anywhere else, Safeway must have planned on building it back in the 1980s, and held onto the land for several years (supermarkets do that all the time), but by 1992 it was clear that Safeway had washed its hands of the Houston area, so they sold it to Food Lion instead, much like how a few Safeway stores (closed before the spin-off) became H-E-B Pantry (Galveston and The Woodlands come to mind). Safeway would return, of course, to Houston, through Randalls, which was the same meatpuppet used Albertsons used as their ticket back into town. Of course, those are stories for another day.

[SpaceGhost]

Makes sense, this is what I figured happened. I was hoping for a slightly more interesting story though Maybe Safeway built and tore down within the space of a few years. Still interesting though! Oddly enough I found a small parcel of land that Food Lion still owns! It's down in Friendswood behind a location I didn't even know existed.