H-E-B’s Market at Stone Oak at its opening in 2014. The store was built on one of four intersections in the area where the company had acquired land a few years earlier. The other three remain undeveloped.In the early 2010s, H-E-B bought four clusters of property at major intersections on the far North Side amid the hilly forests that were rapidly becoming the neighborhoods east of Joint Base San Antonio-Camp Bullis.
And while H-E-B continues to build in prime locations, Walmart hasn’t opened a new store in five years. “You don’t want to necessarily go across the street from your competitor if you can avoid it,” he said. “It’s a thin-margin business, so anything you can do to increase your sales is going to go right to your bottom line.”
The other properties range as far away as a 29.3-acre site at the crossing of Culebra Road and Highway 211 on the far West Side near the Medina County line; a 13.7-acre site along Interstate 10 just down the road from Fair Oaks Ranch and 4 miles south of Boerne; and a 60.6-acre site at the crossing of Loop 1604 and Interstate 10 on the far East Side.
From 2012 to 2016, the Bentonville, Ark.-based company built 11 of its Walmart Supercenter grocery and department stores and seven of its Neighborhood Market grocery stores in Bexar County, according to the Bexar Appraisal District. It does not appear to own any vacant properties that could be used to build a supercenter or neighborhood market.