Grocery Store Chains Are in a Land Rush to Build in Dallas’ Booming Market

A funny thing happened while Dallas shoppers were waiting for H-E-B to finally open a store in the city proper. Almost everyone else, from discounters to ethnic to specialty to big boxes to traditional supermarkets, has been opening stores at a pace like almost nowhere else in the country.

The most recent announcement came from BJ’s Wholesale Club, a membership big-box store mostly located on the East Coast, which said it would build a couple of more stores in the Dallas area, with the first opening next month. Even Kroger and Tom Thumb parent Albertson’s, both of which are cutting costs in the wake of their failed 2025 merger (which has included store closings), are expanding in the Dallas area.

And this just isn’t out in the far suburbs on plowed-over cotton fields, where the growth has traditionally taken place. There are even infill stores, the real estate term for those built in existing neighborhoods in the heart of Dallas, which hasn’t been all that common around here.

So why is Dallas at the center of what can only be called Grocery Store Wars?

All Eyes on Dallas

“This is the market that every retailer has eyes on now,” says Bob Young, the executive managing director for the Weitzman Group in Dallas, who tracks this data. “And it doesn’t matter what kind of grocer – mainstream, discounter, the whole gamut. They all want to be here.”

In this, say those who work in commercial real estate, the grocery chains are capitalizing on the Dallas area’s rapid growth and the higher incomes that have come with that growth, as well as changes in the supermarket business that have seen grocers fine-tune the e-commerce model that dominated the business in the couple of years after the pandemic. That means spending money to build new stores that they didn’t build when they were developing their online shopping systems. They’re playing catch-up, say, several analysts.

According to figures from RetailStat, a retail real estate consultancy in New York City, the Dallas area’s median household income is around $100,000, and more than one-third of residents here have a college degree. It predicts that the number of supermarkets will increase by 12% by 2029; similar figures from Weitzman expect the number of new stores opening in DFW to increase by two-thirds from last year to this year.

”What’s happening in Dallas is similar to what happened in North Carolina’s Research Triangle [around Raleigh-Durham] several years ago,” says RetailStat’s Michael Infranco. “So you’ve got new grocers coming in because the market is so attractive, and the grocers who are already there are building new stores to protect their market share.”

In addition, the chains are trying to adapt to changes in consumer behavior, where we don’t shop at just one store, but several, supplementing a traditional grocer like Tom Thumb with visits to a discounter like Aldi, a specialty store like Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, and a warehouse store like Costco. Plus, says Young, we don’t go just once a week, as our parents or grandparents did, but two or three times a week, picking a couple of things here, a couple of other things there, and even more at a third store. 

And, finally, we’re back to HEB.

Jon Hetzel of Madison Partners, whose company helped bring Trader Joe’s to Lower Greenville, says that the legendary Texas grocery giant is so feared that other retailers, including the biggest ones like Walmart and Kroger, will build new stores to beat HEB to the punch. Much of the current expansion, he says, is almost certainly related to that – the others trying to keep up with HEB so it doesn’t steal their best markets.

Which probably doesn’t surprise anyone in Dallas waiting for HEB to break ground at Hillcrest and LBJ – and waiting and waiting