This store has a small strip mall on the left side, which has O'Reilly Auto Parts as its main tenant (oddly, this space was once Blockbuster Video, which must have led to very direct competition with Albertsons' large video-rental business back in the day). The strip mall is painted to match the old Albertsons color scheme, but it somehow looks even uglier over here! 😉
Interestingly enough, one of the O'Reilly Auto Parts near me is located right next to an AutoZone that was once a Blockbuster Video! I suppose the large growth of those auto part chains coincided with the downfall of Blockbuster Video so perhaps there are quite a few of Blockbuster-to-auto part store conversions out there.
ReplyDeleteO'Reilly Auto Parts is one of those chains that seemed to grow mostly via acquisitions. Here in Houston, they purchased the rather prolific Hi/LO Auto Supply chain that was based in Houston around the turn of the Millennium. The two O'Reillys I shop at were initially Hi/LOs. One is in a shopping center like this one in your photo. The initial main anchor in that shopping center was a Gerland's Food Fair, a local supermarket chain that ended up merging with Food Town somewhere along the way, but the Gerland's there closed about 30 years ago (I did visit there when it was open though). That shopping center never really gained another major anchor, but O'Reilly has been there for decades now.
The other location is a freestanding location that is even older I'm quite sure. It's practically a metal shack with a gravel parking lot. I suppose it got new signage and paint when O'Reilly took it over, but otherwise that building is much the same as it was in the 1970s probably. It's a real retail survivor.
I think out west, O'Reilly took over the Checker/Schucks/Kragen chain of auto parts stores. Quick research shows me that Schucks was the chain in the NW and that they date back to 1917. That's quite a long history! This O'Reilly looks relatively new so maybe it wasn't a Schucks, but I'm not sure.
Back when auto parts stores were mostly regional, I would hear about a lot of other auto parts stores that weren't in this area when watching car-related programming on TV. Sure, we had plenty of auto parts stores here like Western Auto and many others, but it was always strange seeing ads for Checker/Schucks/Kragen and others. I always thought Checker/Schucks/Kragen had a strange name...or names really! I might have visited a Kragen while in Fresno, CA in 1990. There was an auto part store next to the motel we were staying at. It's a paint store now, but there is a newish looking O'Reilly next to that paint store now and that O'Reilly used to be a Kragen. That's probably the closest I've been to a Schucks, lol.
Ha, that's funny!
DeleteSchucks was really the big auto parts chain around here for many years, and locals were not particularly happy when O'Reilly took over (as always happens). Admittedly, Schucks wasn't particularly local either for quite some time, but at least they kept the local name intact.
You're right that this one never seems to have been a Schucks. I was planning to mention the whole Schucks thing, but when I looked back in Street View, I found Blockbuster instead!
Oh, and if you think Schucks is a weird name, you would have really loved the Schucks-O'Reilly co-branded era! Their radio jingles were catchy enough that I still remember them from that brief period about a decade ago.
Schucks-O'Reilly doesn't quite roll off the tongue quite like Bon Macy's, eh? Lol.
DeleteI think some of this co-branding when there are mergers were more common in the NW than they were here. When Foley's became Macy's, Macy's completely wiped away any trace of the Foley's name immediately. I don't remember O'Reilly keeping the Hi/LO name around after they purchased them, but maybe they did. That merger was over 20 years ago so it's hard to remember.
I do remember being quite confused about who O'Reilly was when Hi/LO stores started to become O'Reilly stores because although I was familiar with a lot of auto part store chains which weren't in Houston, O'Reilly wasn't one of those that I was familiar with. I had even been to Springfield, MO, O'Reilly's hometown, but I still wasn't familiar with them!
AutoZone, Advance Auto Parts, and O'Reilly are the three dominant auto part chains here in Houston. Out of the three, AutoZone seems to be doing the best from my observations and Advance seems to be struggling the most since they're really the only one that has closed stores. Retail Retell might be pleased to know that AutoZone is doing the best since they are based in Memphis, lol. AutoZone also opened up a 24 hour location here in Houston a few years ago in an old Alco discount store location. AutoZone has been in Houston since the 1980s when they were known as Auto Shack (I think Tandy/Radio Shack forced them to change that name). Anyway, they've been here long enough that some of their older stores still have neon-like signage on the outside which is pretty cool.
Ha, not so much! I think those are really the only two dual-branding cases I can think of, so it's not that big of a trend around here.
DeleteHonestly, I don't know anywhere near enough about auto parts stores to say anything about them. I didn't even think we had Advance Auto Parts around here, but I looked it up and yes, we do!