H-E-B’s Frisco store will open Sept. 21

By Maria Halkias

H-E-B is ready to open its Frisco store, its first in a major expansion the Texas grocer has planned for Dallas-Fort Worth.

The store at 4800 Main St. will open on Wednesday, Sept. 21, at 6 a.m.

H-E-B has hired 700 people to run the 111,000-square-foot supermarket. That’s twice as many employees as a Walmart Supercenter.

At one end of the new store is the retailer’s True Texas BBQ restaurant with a drive-through and on the other side is a pharmacy drive-through with two lanes.

The store will have a section with prepared foods under H-E-B’s “Meal Simple” brand, and the wine section includes a sampling station. The store will have a household essentials section and H-E-B’s outdoor living section called Texas Backyard.

The curbside grocery pickup area is larger than the ones at the chain’s local Central Market stores. There are about 50 spaces on the east side of the building marked for curbside pickup.

And H-E-B is wasting no time — its app will start accepting curbside orders two days before the opening. Orders can be placed at 1 a.m. Sept. 19 to be ready on opening day.

Next to the curbside pickup area is a small park with giant fruit sculptures, seating and a Frisco sculpture with the letter “I” left out for people to pose for social media moments. A bike rack is shaped like a carrot.

Competition for grocery dollars in the North Texas market is about to crank up as H-E-B carries out its plans for this store and a second in Plano that is also expected to open this fall. Two more H-E-B stores are under construction and will open next summer in McKinney and Allen.

Frisco now has three Kroger stores and two each from Tom Thumb, Market Street, Target and Walmart. Aldi, Costco Warehouse Club, Sprouts Farmers Market and 99 Ranch Market each operate one store in Frisco.

Just in time for gasoline prices falling below $3 in some Texas locations, this intersection may be the stage for even lower prices. On Sunday, Gas Buddy listed $2.96 at a Walmart in Burleson and $2.93 at a Circle K in Grand Prairie. Prices in Frisco were still above $3.

H-E-B has built a car wash and 10 gasoline pumps in its parking lot right next to a large RaceTrac. There’s also a QuikTrip on the southwest corner of the intersection.

The new store will be open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week. H-E-B’s grand openings in other cities have attracted huge crowds lining up before the store opens. There was a storm when H-E-B’s Lubbock store opened last October, but lines formed anyway.

Frisco, which was founded in 1905 as a railroad depot, is regularly listed as one of the fastest-growing markets in the U.S. by various measures and surveys. The city has about doubled its population in the last 10 years and now has more than 200,000 residents. As recently as the 1970s, Frisco had just three local family-run small grocery stores that are now the sites of Exxon and Chevron convenience stores and a law office.