[doodlebugging]

The Butts are some good people. When I was a kid in Central Texas my family shopped at their stores. It was a real drag to move to a part of Texas outside their operating range and spend so many years there so their recent expansion across the state is the one welcome thing about Texas.

HEB and their upscale Central Market are the only grocery stores that we visit. We do drop by World Market occasionally for oddball things but if we don't grow it and HEB/CM doesn't sell it we probably aren't eating it.

I think one of the best things about the new HEBs is the attached BBQ store. Dependably good BBQ options with a Central Texas BBQ flavor that beat all of the fast food options locally. We have a wide selection of fast foods since this region is in a massive growth stage absorbing all the FtW refugees. HEB BBQ and the other fresh meals available inside that take little or no prep are dependable, flavorful, options for quick meals and picnics.

Locally we have Walmart, Target, Albertsons, Brookshires, Winn Dixie(?), Aldi, and maybe a couple other smaller ones including some Dollar (G/T) stores for groceries. Walmart is the only one that offers similar options but the quality of their fresh stuff can't measure up. Albertsons was the go-to for years if we had to swing into town for groceries and didn't feel like adding the extra commute to FtW Central Market. We stopped going there after we took a rafting trip down the Salmon in Idaho and rounded a curve in the river and found a large vacation home built right up on the bank complete with a concrete boat ramp. The river guide told us the house was a vacation home owned by the Albertsons grocery store family and that it was vacant most of the year. The concrete ramp is not allowed on any stretch of the river since it is in a Wild and Scenic area but it was built anyway because the sanction for building the ramp was a simple annual fine, easily affordable for billionaire grocers. We had rafted that river several times over the years and the encroachment of second homes and vacation homes on all the high spots up there really degrades the wilderness feel.

I'm not going too far down that trail today since that is too far OT.

If you're in Texas, HEB is the grocery store. The others suck balls.

[steve-atx-7600]

My favorite thing was when the largest HEBs had garden centers. They had a selection of native plants that you would only find at local specialty $$$ nurseries at fair prices. I wish they would bring these back. I would start in the garden center and they by the time I found all kinds of new things I didn’t know that I needed in the rest of the store, I’d get a where the f are you call from my wife because it was 2 hours later.

[doodlebugging]

I understand how this works with the wife. I "graze" the store when I go by myself though I do carry a list of things to pick up. The local store has a wide selection of Texas native plants at good prices. Some of these plants I had never heard of and I am in the process of restoration of my own property so it was good to see something at HEB and pull up the NPSoT (Native Plant Society of Texas) data on it to find that it used to be common in the region before development. Their garden products are also competitively priced - wood chips and mulch, garden soils, etc.

[jmalicki]

> I think one of the best things about the new HEBs is the attached BBQ store.

Not a Texan, just visited occasionally.

This sentence more than anything has just made me want to become a Texan. I did not know this was a thing, but that sounds amazing.

[viccis]

In Houston they also sell boiled crawfish by the pound during crawfish season so you can have a big crawfish dinner with you and your friends without the whole process of making them yourself.

The catch is that, like the crawfish, their BBQ is pretty mid. So if you want great BBQ, you gotta drive a mile or two to a real BBQ place. But if you want some brisket before you do your grocery shopping, it hits the spot.

[doodlebugging]

I'm not gonna argue the quality of HEB BBQ since it obviously stands on its own merits among Texas shoppers. The meat that I smoke at home is better than any that I have bought at a BBQ joint or stand in the country outside of this one stand in Greenville, Mississippi. While working there, I made sure that I stocked up on meats every day. That man had it down. I've been eating BBQ since I was a small child and I'm on the downhill side of life right now.

[drivingmenuts]

I would rate their BBQ equal to anything else you'll find in Austin, except maybe Franklin BBQ, which I don't have the patience for, so I haven't tried it nor will I bother.

[lotsofpulp]

> We stopped going there after we took a rafting trip down the Salmon in Idaho and rounded a curve in the river and found a large vacation home built right up on the bank complete with a concrete boat ramp.

The Albertsons founding family and heirs has had nothing to do with Albertsons grocery stores for at least 20 years.

If I were you, and if the information above was true, my beef would be with the government and the voters.

[doodlebugging]

My beef is in fact with the government and the voters and those who use their wealth to destroy something that others have paid a substantial part of their own incomes to go out and enjoy. The first time I rafted and kayaked that river there was one dirt road that ran along the river for a few miles past the put-in and miles further down the canyon there was one high-tension power line. You were miles into the Snake River before you saw homes from the river. Over the decades I ran that same stretch several times and each time encroachment was worse. Rich cocksuckers who build homes that they only use for a week at a time are the equivalent of cockroaches that drop their egg cases and move on. One egg case causes the whole area to become infested with others in a few short years.

The attraction of the river was the silence and the grand views, paddling the rapids at different flow levels and learning to read the water, watching wildlife come up to the river, admiring the geologic story told by the rocks exposed on the canyon walls, the dark night skies. Once you add a structure, with the supporting access roads, powerlines, etc into the mix you have destroyed something that was worth saving for future generations. I don't expect everyone to understand that since too many people spend their lives caught up in the bullshit pursuit of money or recognition.

I don't give a shit whether that family still owns or runs the grocery business or did when they built that place. The fact that they built there, right on the river and built a ramp to launch their jet-boat on what had been one of the quietest stretches of the river makes them my enemy and worthy of my contempt. The fact that they decided to build the ramp and just pay the annual fines is an artifact of a broken system where penalties and sanctions do not match the gravity of the infraction. Wealthy people do whatever they want, trashing things everywhere they go. It could be true that this will never change. I'm hoping that it will though and working to help it along.