As H-E-B continues its expansion across North Texas, Walmart is stepping up to compete with the grocery powerhouse in some of the Metroplex’s fastest-growing suburbs.
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After years of no new Supercenter construction throughout the U.S., Walmart has three of its largest-scale stores on the way in Frisco, Melissa and Celina. H-E-B stores recently opened in the first two of those cities, while the Texas grocery goliath known for its fresh tortillas bought 21 acres for a future store in Celina last year.
Construction on the $16M Celina, $14.9M Melissa and $13.5M Frisco Walmart stores is slated to be completed this year. They range in size from more than 197K SF in Frisco to nearly 202K SF in Melissa.
Those stores represent Walmart's first new Supercenter construction in North Texas since it built a $9.2M store in Lucas in 2013, according to listings with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.
The addition of Walmart to these booming North Texas cities could bring further retail development thanks to their status as a “mega anchor,” according to Retail Specialists Executive Vice President Bill Read.
“They’re going to become the bullseye for the market, for the retail trade area, and people want to be around that,” Read told Modern Retail.
H-E-B has locations in Allen, Plano, McKinney, Alliance, Mansfield, Melissa and Frisco with typical sizes of 125K SF or more. The San Antonio-based retailer is building stores in Irving, Prosper, Rockwall, Murphy, Forney and the Mid-Cities area.
The company also purchased a 10-acre site just south of Interstate 635 for its first store in the city of Dallas earlier this year.
At the start of the year, Weitzman declared 2025 would be a rerun of 2024's “Year Of The Grocer,” with supermarket chains like H-E-B expected to push the retail sector to a new record occupancy rate of 95.6%.
“When [Walmart] can find a location in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex where they’re not cannibalizing the sales of their other neighborhood grocery stores or other Supercenters, they’re certainly going to build those stores, because there are a lot of people moving here every day,” Weitzman Executive Vice President of Retail Brokerage A. David Zoller told Modern Retail.
Walmart opened its first newly-built Supercenter in more than four years in April in the Houston suburb of Cypress. The big-box chain calls the Cypress store the first U.S. example of its “store of the future,” featuring QR codes for digital interactions, a new layout, an expanded vision center and a modernized pharmacy.
H-E-B opened a store in Cypress in October of last year.
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