H-E-B's largest store opens in SA

The new H-E-B Plus at Loop 1604 and Bandera Road is built on 44 acres and has over 1,180 parking spaces. The new H-E-B Plus at Loop 1604 and Bandera Road is built on 44 acres and has over 1,180 parking spaces. Photo: BILLY CALZADA, San Antonio Express-News Photo: BILLY CALZADA, San Antonio Express-News Image 1 of / 12 Caption Close H-E-B's largest store opens in SA 1 / 12 Back to Gallery

Thirteen varieties of baby tomatoes, coffee makers from $9 to $99, made-while-you-wait guacamole — these are just some of the items housed in the planet's largest H-E-B, opening today at Bandera Road and Loop 1604.

At a whopping 182,000 square feet, the new H-E-B Plus is more than twice the size of the adjacent H-E-B, which was scheduled to shut its doors for good Thursday night. The company will lease out the old store.

The new store is in the San Antonio area's busiest market for new-home building. A third of new-housing starts have happened on the far West Side since the early 1980s, according to the housing research firm Metrostudy.

“The first thing you have to realize is the epicenter of growth in San Antonio is moving to that side of town,” commercial real estate broker Earnest Grub said.

The store is the company's 10th H-E-B Plus. It has 332 stores in Texas and Mexico.

The new H-E-B Plus is ringed with specialty departments.

“In the store where we had been, we only had an aisle and a half of pet,” said the store's general manager, Robert Torres, gesturing toward a section of the new store that he referred to as a “destination shop” for pet owners.

Other special departments include baby items, outdoor grilling and a party section where gift bags come with the tissue paper already fluffed just-so “because the guys can't do the bags,” Torres explained.

There are T-shirts and beach towels for vacationers who drift over from nearby Sea World and Six Flags Fiesta Texas and ask for those sorts of things, said Torres, a 38-year H-E-B veteran who has spent the past 11 years working at the previous Bandera Road and 1604 site and knows a thing or two about what customers in the area want.

“I really think the merchandise we have here appeals to all customers,” he said. “We just weren't able to carry it all in our other store.

“Take a look at all of the doors of dairy,” Torres said. It's more than at any other H-E-B store. “And we're able to stock them from behind.”

Efficiencies like that will help the store's 561 employees — 150 are new hires — keep the mammoth market running without getting in the customers' way. For instance, shelves of soft drinks are extra deep so they can be stocked just once, at night, and shouldn't need restocking during operating hours.

Though they're deep, the shelving units aren't very high, a design feature intended to help shoppers avoid the closed-in feeling that can come with wandering the aisles of a super-sized store. Bottles of wine in tipped-back wooden bins lend a specialty shop feel to a grocery store the size of a big-box retailer.

The store has high, open ceilings webbed with wooden trusses and studded with skylights.

“It is designed for day-lighting,” said Charlie Wernette, director of engineering, design and construction for H-E-B. “The lights that you see dim based on the amount of daylight that's coming in. We want them to look like they're on, but they're burning as low as they can.”

Other efforts toward sustainability include “night shades” that pull over open refrigerated cases to conserve energy after hours, LED lighting on motion sensors in frozen food cases that turns off when no one is in the aisle, and a system to use waste heat pulled from refrigerated cases and freezers to heat water.

Some of these features, like the LED lighting, cost more on the front end but will pay for themselves with longer life and reduced energy costs, said Bryan Hoffmann, H-E-B's director of general construction services.

“We work very hard to make sure there's a return on investment in all of our ideas,” Wernette said.

lkastner@express-news.net

Twitter: @lkastner

Staff Writer Jennifer Hiller contributed to this report.