Riverpointe Shopping Center (Conroe, Texas)

This another post that expands on a Carbon-izer page, this time focusing on Riverpointe Shopping Center. While this won't extensively cover every tenant there it will focus on just two major store spaces and a restaurant in the parking lot.

At 230 South Loop 336 West was a Kmart store (#3648), opening back in November 1989 and later converted to Big Kmart before closing in early 2003.

It remained vacant for a few years until Incredible Pizza Company opened in August 2005. Also known as Conroe's Incredible Pizza Company, it was a part of a franchised chain of pizza buffet and entertainment centers and one of the first stores of that chain in the region. I remember when I was first looking into this years ago, maybe circa 2010-2011, the Incredible Pizza Company website was one of those websites that had audio tracks that loaded automatically, so you'd load up the page and immediately it would start blaring "GO KARTS RUN ON INDOOR TRACKS (INCREDIBLE PIZZA COMPANY), OLD MEMORIES WILL TAKE YOU BACK (INCREDIBLE PIZZA COMPANY)" but thankfully it doesn't do that anymore. IPC doesn't use their entire space; the rest of the former Kmart was used for the Conroe campus of Champion Forest Baptist Church, but now (since 2022) is Pillar Church.

As a complement to the Kmart, there was also Albertsons at 220 South Loop 336 West on the other side of the center. The store (#2723 post-1996 renumbering) operating from 1989 until early 2002, when Albertsons pulled out of the Houston market and sold many of their stores (including this one) to Kroger. Kroger quickly reopened it as one of their own but closed this store in 2017 when they built a much larger Kroger Marketplace a quarter mile away. It remained vacant until 2024 when it was cut into three spaces with Planet Fitness and Dollar Tree taking two of them.

Finally, in the parking lot sits Ni's Chinese Buffet (226 South Loop 336 West). Shoney's was here from 1994 to around 1999 (I don't think there was anything before that). Porkey's Cafe was here from 2000 to 2001; Ni's opened in December 2003 and has been here since.