If you have travelled outside of the Texarkana area into larger cities you may have been to larger grocery chains such as Whole Foods, Trader Joes, HEB, Aldi etc,. These larger chains tend to be in bigger cities such as Houston, Austin and more, but one Texarkana woman is trying to gain her communities support to encourage HEB, a mostly Texas and Mexico based grocery store to come to the Texarkana area.
Hailey Livingston lived in Austin from 2017-2018 and loved visiting her local HEB for their higher quality and affordable food options, as well as their variety that is sorely lacking in our local supermarkets. “My husband and I loved it because they had so much variety including a sushi bar, homemade tortilla area, incredible pre-made dinner options, amazing coffee and grinders and so much more. It would just be nice if the Texarkana area had something similar so we could have more variety in our day to day shopping,” said Livingston.
Currently HEB has 420 stores across Texas and Mexico with over 145,000 employees. “If HEB could come to the Texarkana area it would bring jobs for a lot of people in our area,” said Livingston. Texarkana in the last 10 years has seen a lot of economic growth, while also failing to keep several large chain businesses around. However, bringing new businesses such as Panda Express and other new business that are opening up next year have already shown to pique local interest.
Gaining the attention of large chain stores can be difficult. “I have reached out to HEB several times over social media asking them to come to the Texarkana area, however they always come back with some generic response. I wanted to try to do something the gain their attention which is why I created the change.org petition. I’m hoping our community will rally together so we can actually make a change and get some of the stores and businesses to come to our city without having to wait,” said Livingston. To sign the Change.org petition click the link HERE.
