As soon as Covid was viewed as a serious threat in the US, they immediately put up plexiglass barriers to protect their cashiers. Immediately and not just half assed barriers. They did as good of a job as I would have done if I were the cashier. Then they transformed their stores to have more warehouse space and ran a free curbside pickup service. All of this and they are still the best grocery store in TX if you care about prices and wide selection of products.

The history of HEB is something I want to learn about. I know from reading Robert Caros LBJ volumes that Howard Butt was funneling a lot of money to LBJ staring in the 30s or 40s. Not to judge that, I’m just curious how they dominated Texas.

My dad worked for HEB for 35 years. He never planned to stay there when he started in the late eighties, but they had better hours than his prior work as a photojournalist and treated him a whole lot better.

HEB believes that if you treat your employees right, that they will in turn treat their customers well.

As someone that has spent years living away from HEB they are just a great store to have access to. Better prices, store brands that are often better than national, and they usually have a good produce selection. When we moved to the San Antonio area a decade ago, having access to HEB again was one of the most exciting parts of the move.

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.

I go to Texas to visit family and a visit or two to H-E-B is usually a part of that. They operate great stores, they treat their employees well (several family members have worked there) and they have great products. I love my local grocery store where I shop but H-E-B is pretty much next level.

The biggest difference I’ve noticed is HEB has plenty of employees who don’t seem depressed to be there.

When I’ve been to HEB I see plenty of cashier lanes open, each with a cashier and bagger, people stocking aisles, a team behind the butcher and bakery counters, etc.

By comparison, Kroger seems to try and have a skeleton crew at all times. Usually a single cashier, a self checkout supervisor, and a couple of people frantically stocking.

The Kroger employees look over worked and clearly unhappy to be there.

The HEB employees seem generally happy and are usually in groups chatting with coworkers and customers while they work.

Shopping at Kroger feels almost dystopian relative to HEB.

I lived in Dallas for about four years. There’s not a lot I miss, but I sure do miss Central Market (an HEB brand).

HEB does a lot of great in house foods too. I don’t regret leaving Texas, but I really miss the fresh tortillas and tamales from HEB sometimes.

> Perhaps the real question isn’t: Why does H-E-B do so many nice things for the state? But: Why aren’t more companies like H-E-B?

> ... in this company’s nearly 120-year history, it’s remained family-owned and operated.

It has been more than a century since the American legal system told publicly-owned companies "Don't Be Good"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

I want someone to start a monthly subscription service that mails HEB tortillas within the continental US using UT Austin students as the smurfs. The ad copy writes itself.

I kind of enjoy grocery store/chain discussions on e.g. national subreddits because it's a way of engaging people normally not into economics, corporate structures and incentives and getting them to actually think about the topics.

Sweden: The dominant one is called ICA. Shared brand and supply chain. Stores are locally owned, typically 1, maybe 2 stores per owner. Store owners own a share of the centralized aspects. Customers generally prefer it, except for those on the (quite) left. It often becomes a political charged debate topic on a national level.

People do seem to at least eventually understand that local ownership is good since it translates into caring.

The charges from the left: a) Possibly valid: They have gotten too good/dominant, b) Just stupid: "They are ripping people off with their 2% profit margins".

Sigh… They’ll never be able to compete with Kroger’s wide selection of extremely expired food.

(/s)

Yep. And they don't charge much of a premium to deliver this. I can buy things at HEB and not worry about them being expired/etc, even for grocery pickup. Kroger, afaict, _chooses_ the expiring/broken stuff if you do grocery pickup. Kroger is closer to me so I've given it several chances, but every time they seem to get me in a new way to get me with opened, expired, or damaged stuff, and I won't be bothered to establish a quality control process just to buy some groceries. Meanwhile I've done grocery pickup from HEB for a couple years now and have maybe 3-4 things I've had to request a refund. The whole foods near me is heading down the Kroger route too.

It's literally just doing the core service better than average and allowing it to yield results. "hmmm lets try not scamming people so we can save pennies on some expired bell peppers in a loss leader area to begin with... Perhaps they'll also pick up some prescriptions while they are here! Heck, I bet if we make some effort to keep our employees relatively happy, customers might also have a better experience in our stores!"

IMO/rant, few businesses/people seem to grasp this and all think there is some magic "business hack" they can do while avoiding doing the core business thing well. And I don't think it's that they don't know it, it's the divorce between the reality they themselves likely desire to live in and experience, and the reality they build/provide day to day in their work. But, that plagues everything these days tbh. Nobody just wants to do the fundamentals well, everyone is looking for "this one simple hack" that alleviates having to just do the work. The calculator might save you some money, but it'll never, by itself, extract the gold from the mine.

Safeway and its nationwide equivalents are the epitome of this. These stores haven’t changed since at least when I was a kid in the 80s. They end up selecting for the most desperate employees because they treat them so badly.

I've experienced the same thing except sed 's/HEB/Publix/g'

This is probably just a 'Kroger vs nice supermarket' thing.

> It has been more than a century since the American legal system told publicly-owned companies "Don't Be Good"

The American legal system did no such thing in the Dodge ruling: as stated in the Wikipedia article itself, the 'pay shareholders' idea was in the obiter dictum (non-binding remark) portion.

And as recently as Burwell v Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court said:

> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives.

* http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,....

Shareholder primacy is a drain on so many levels. Think of all the R&D that could have been spent instead of buying back shares.

There are plenty of crappy family owned business that pay too little and expect too much. I don’t know if this is a public vs private company issue.

I don’t think that ruling distills down that far. But I will grant you that if you’re leaving enough obvious money on the table, activist investors will come knocking.

> Why does H-E-B do so many nice things for the state? But: Why aren’t more companies like H-E-B?

Regardless any sort of legal principle, the fact is capitalism rewards exploitation. The more a company exploits, the more profit it can bring in. Whether that be worker or customer.

While it's not stated that way in business management courses, that's exactly how it's taught in a round about way. The entire business class is chasing after efficiency, how to do more with less. And their idols are the likes of Walmart who will shut down a store if anyone says "union" and who aggressively negotiates for tax breaks in every location where their stores go up.

But further, venture capitalists have learned that one of the most effective ways to extract capital is to purchase well respected brands and destroy their quality while sucking off every last bit of value before customers wise up to the impending death of a beloved brand (see Sears, KMart, and basically all of fast food at this point. Also, be prepared to see this in your vet, dentist, and retirement homes).

People make millions doing these awful things which is why they keep happening. It's simply a lot harder and less profitable to make a "good" company which makes good products and respects their customers. And if H-E-B ever sells to a 3rd party, exactly the same thing will happen to them in a heartbeat.