Is anyone else obsessed with their local grocery store?

In the chronically online world we live in, there’s something wholesome about shopping shoulder to shoulder next to our neighbors. While covering the rapid growth of supermarket construction in Texas, I realized these concrete megamarts aren’t just focal points of the food economy, they’re gathering places that reflect what the local community eats and cares about — like Texas-shaped pasta or the local football team.

I’m taking over the Marketplace newsletter this week to dig into this idea, and connect the oil industry outside my door in Houston to the war in the Middle East. Whether you’re a North Texas family in a fast-growing suburb or one of the 3.2 million Iranians uprooted from their homes, at the end of the day don’t we all just want to be able to live in peace and put food on the table? – Elizabeth Trovall, Marketplace reporter

Not a cucumber or cereal box is out of place at the spacious new Kroger store that opened last fall in north Fort Worth, Texas.

The superstore, roughly the size of two football fields, boasts wide aisles, local high school sports merch, and coffee from Pax & Beneficia, a local North Texas chain that’s set up shop inside.

The new supermarket is part of a wave of new grocery store construction in Texas , spurred by years of rapid population growth in the region. Many of these new builds are concentrated in Dallas-Fort Worth, one of the most active markets for new grocer construction in the country.

 

As retailers like Kroger, H-E-B, and Costco build up their brick-and-mortar footprint to meet pent up demand from population growth, they’re strategizing on how to attract and retain new customers. 

“Development jumped,” said Bob Young, who helped develop the new Kroger and other Texas grocery stores for the real estate firm Weitzman. “Can it be competitive? Yes.”

That competition has taken on a unique Texas flavor. 

Kroger is running a new Texas playbook, which includes a corporate restructure and leans into state pride, authenticity and local store customization. Signage at the new Fort Worth Kroger features the shape of Texas and local brands and producers. 

Young said it’s not a coincidence that the vibe feels reflective of one of Kroger’s biggest competitors: Texas’s own grocery chain H-E-B. 

“The identity of H-E-B is preeminent in the grocery space,” Young said. “They have people camping out at night to go into their store. Talk about customer loyalty!”

Around noon on the second to last Sunday in February, as a massive snowstorm was getting going along the East Coast, Ryan Hall went live on YouTube.

He stayed live for 10 hours, updating the forecast and checking in with storm chasers, officials and viewers. The next morning he was back before 7 a.m. for another full day of live coverage of what he called the “full-dumpage snowicane.”

Hall’s channel, Ryan Hall, Y’all, is one of the most popular weather accounts on social media and YouTube, where he has more than 3 million subscribers. It started as a hobby early in the pandemic.   

“I didn't think it was going to turn into anything, and here we are, about five years after that,” he said with a laugh, “we took off insanely.”

A growing number of degreed meteorologists and self-taught weather enthusiasts are taking that non-traditional path, trying to make a name, and a living, doing the weather on social media. Hall is an outlier — few accounts are as big or bring in as much money as his. But with audiences increasingly turning to social platforms rather than television news for forecasts and weather coverage, many are having success.

“I say I took a non-traditional path into meteorology,” Hall said. “And I think it's opened up a door to where this is a real career path now for people who want to get into doing the weather not on TV.”

Listen to “Lost in the Supermarket” on YouTube | Apple Music | Spotify

I may be enamored by the local brands and Texas-shaped products at my local supermarket shelves, so let’s balance things out with a song about consumerism and suburban alienation: “I'm all lost in the supermarket / I can no longer shop happily / I came in here for the special offer / A guaranteed personality.” Coincidentally, the song was written in 1979, the year of the second oil crisis when global oil production dropped following the Iranian Revolution.