http://www.statesman...year-2311879.html

Yep, Central Market is an HEB store. I've stopped at one here a couple times, but it's not convenient. I normally shop at the HEB plus! in Pearland, they stock a number of items from Central Market. Fun story - while in high school, we lived in Portland, just across Nueces Bay from Corpus Christi where HEB's headquarters was at the time (they relocated to San Antonio a while back). Their IT manager lived across the street from us and he backed into my car one day. He stopped by to give us his insurance info so my folks walked him back to my room where I was working on my Vic 20 BBS software. After explaining what I was working on and showing him the code (both assembly and BASIC), he told me to come work for him when I finished school (I was 16 a the time). Never took him up on it though, I'm not a fan of Corpus Christi and much prefer living in Houston.

We've been getting a number of California chains of late. Probably a side effect of the influx of people we've had from that state. While I liked the food at Carl's Jr, I've stopped going there because the service has been really bad and the restaurant's haven't been clean - I'd get there around 11:30 before the lunch rush starts, but always have trouble finding a clean table in the nearly empty restaurant. They would also screw my order up almost half the time.

Another thing we get spoiled with:
http://spiceware.org...ery/Misc/IMG_1090

I picked that up yesterday. HEB makes these, but I seldom buy them due to my low carb diet.
http://www.flickr.co...6@N07/6336051707/

Back in the 80s when I first moved to Houston one of my jobs was at Gerland's Food Fair. One of things I found out was that almost all the stores in Houston got their goods from the distributor Grocers Supply (GS). As a cost savings HEB handles their own distribution so they wouldn't be using GS. Because of this, if any grocery store closed GS would buy it at whatever cost and, if need be, sell it at a loss to prevent HEB from getting in the market.

HEB ended up creating HEB Pantry, which were smaller stores and started opening them up in Houston. I didn't care for them as I was used to their full sized stores in Corpus Christi, but they did the job and HEB became successful in the Houston market. None of the Pantry stores remain, they've all been replaced with new full sized stores.

http://www.bizjourna...ry4.html?page=all

interesting tidbit from that article:

The two Central Market stores in Austin have become a tourist attraction of sorts, drawing in more than 1.5 million visitors a year, second only to the state Capitol in terms of Austin tourist attractions.

boggles my mind that a grocery story is a tourist attraction.