One of the more popular posts1 on Albertsons Florida Blog (a site I still follow regularly) is their look at Albertsons #4466, located in St. Port Lucie, Florida, which closed in 2012 despite a recently renewed lease and supposed profitability (it's possible that it did well right before the recession, where the PSL area was hit heavily with foreclosures). Well, PSL did have a twin store (more like a multiple birth), #2766, located at 9125 West Sam Houston Parkway North. Unlike #4466, which was mauled for a Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market, #2766 closed a decade prior but remained remarkably intact under Kroger.
Despite being updated with the same Kroger décor ("Bountiful") that had swept the chain by that time, Kroger #739 as it is numbered now2, still held remarkably true to the 4466 layout. It had the same ceiling style and bore enough of a resemblance that I was able to look at the map with my phone and more or less follow it through. I could probably look at the pictures in AFB and visualize the "Grocery Palace" (Albertsons' official name for the package—this is sometimes called "Theme Park", a term Acme Style coined). The Starbucks was in the same place, the deli and meats were in the same place, and while the center store probably saw a rearrangement at some point, there were a few notable changes in the front. The old camera center had been converted to offices with the pet supply area converted to HBA, with the pharmacy next to it (it also added a walk-up pharmacy), and a bank space as well (this may have been part of the original layout), as well as a few other changes. The area around the florist was downsized (didn't see evidence of the former laundromat, though I wasn't looking too hard), as the customer service desk was moved either next to the restrooms or in front of the "Albertsons Reading Center" area. This store opened in 1999 (September 1999, if my notes are right), spending about two and a half years as an Albertsons before being sold to Kroger.
This part of town is very Kroger-concentrated due to them purchasing a number of Albertsons locations in town. Just two miles west on West Road is another Kroger (a Kroger Signature built around the turn of the millennium), and at that point, it's where you can find four Kroger stores within a three mile radius, two of which were former Albertsons (the other, of course, is 2790) and two of which were older stores on Northwest Freeway, one of which was a former Safeway/AppleTree. There was a period of about three years when all of these stores operated.
I didn't get a lot of pictures of the store, unfortunately, but the former Albertsons Express is still in business as Kroger's "Kwik Shop", which is run by their convenience store division (a full Kroger-run and Kroger-branded convenience store was opened in College Station in 2016, and that made industry headlines) before they sold off the division, at which point it was run by the supermarket chain thesmselves.
This was the current Street View when this post was originally posted in 2018, with the pictures here taken in summer 2016 by author. It also was an updated version of a 2016 post of Safeway and Albertsons in Texas Blog.
1. In 2016, anyway. I don't have access to recent metrics.
2. In the Houston/Southwest Division of Kroger, #7xx stores were acquired from Albertsons.
UPDATE 07-29-2026: Updated for integration to Carbon-izer with new name (formerly titled as "Kroger #739"). The original post is now almost a decade old.
