Weinacker's Winn-Dixie (Mobile, Alabama)

This photo, via Mapquest (but clearly taken from elsewhere) is one of the few photos of the 1986-2010 iteration of this store.
This post marks the first Alabama entry on Numbered Exits. Albertsons Florida Blog and sister site My Florida Retail have documented many Winn-Dixie stores that got turned into Aldi, which is less "turned into Aldi" and more like "closed with part of it being it being Aldi and the rest being vacant".

In 1986, supermarket chain Delchamps built a store at 1550 Government Street (actually facing South Catherine Street) to replace its smaller store at the same address. This was a redevelopment of Weinacker's Shopping Center (which had, and still does, have a sign on the property, claiming to be there since 1882)¹. Joining Delchamps was Eckerd, which also shared the 1550 Government Street.² In 1990, Harco Drug purchased the Mobile Eckerd stores, and in 1997, Harco was purchased by Rite Aid, though it seems that this was one of the first to go, by 2007 it had been vacant for several years.

Meanwhile, in 2000, Delchamps' parent company Jitney Jungle (which had purchased it a few years earlier) declared bankruptcy and sold off all of its stores. Winn-Dixie Stores of Jacksonville picked up a good number of the Delchamps/Jitney Jungle stores. I had previously believed that Winn-Dixie was the "legitimate" heir to Delchamps and had done a slower conversion over 2001, but that wasn't the case. Instead, Delchamps advertisementdid to try to sell off inventory though not deeply discounted as a typical going out of business sale might be, with this full page ad suggesting that Winn-Dixie closed the stores to do a reset and conversion on them (at least this one)...but the Delchamps name remained on the store anyway for a few weeks afterward.

In 2010, Winn-Dixie (store #1333) did a full inside and out renovation and absorbed the long-vacant Eckerd/Harco/Rite Aid space but in late 2024 was closed to be Aldi, reopening in February 2025.

1. Based on what I can find, the "shopping center" originated out of a store called Weinacker's. The store had been first been built in 1882, rebuilt in 1913, then replaced in 1952, which by that time had evolved into a supermarket. By 1970 (newspaper archives do not exist before then online, at least from my access) this had been divided between Walgreens and Delchamps, with the former selling its Mobile stores to Eckerd in 1973.
2. Both Delchamps and Eckerd shared the 1550 Government address from before the redevelopment. Eckerd had taken over from Walgreens in 1973.

Abandoned 7-Eleven at a Former Kettle Site (Conroe, Texas)

Courtesy Loopnet. The nearby CVS has been an "y Mas" store since 2019.
As part of revamping this site, I'm splitting 904 West Davis Street off from this page. This used to be a Kettle restaurant (#22, 1974 to around 2010), which started to disappear en masse around this time (it was once a rather popular chain in Texas and the South). It quickly reopened as Conroe Café but within a few years became El Charrito Restaurant and by late 2019 was gone entirely. The lot was redeveloped as 7-Eleven in 2020, but it was one of the earlier casualties of 7-Eleven underperforming in the Houston area, and it closed in 2024. As of this writing it is still vacant.

Abandoned Exprezit! Store (Quincy, Florida)

Can you see the gas station through the weeds? (Picture by author, August 2025)
A few years ago I was delighted to find that someone had taken a picture of an Exprezit gas station and convenience store. It wasn't the same store my family stopped in December 2003 (yes, a week or so before the picture in Marianna was taken by Tod Allen). I'm pretty sure some Exprezit! stores even made to Louisiana (some were planned for South Texas circa 2006) but a few years later they disappeared as quickly as they came, with only a few camped out in their home of North Carolina, despite once having sizable Florida presence (reduced to maybe one store in Florida today).

This Exprezit store escaped being rebranded (many are BP or 76 today) because it closed a while back, not even on the 2006 locator list, nor on a 1999 list (guess it purchased it and closed in that timeframe). It's an old gas station, too, dating to around the 1980s and in 1994 was a Texaco advertising t-shirts and ice cream; however, the convenience store name is too hard to see in that photo. Looking through old Google Earth images no cars appear in it from 2005 on so I would suspect Exprezit kept the 43 Spooner Road location and abandoned it by that time, and it's been shut ever since. The long driveway (no dedicated left turn, even) likely discouraged travelers on I-10. I noticed it when I spotted the distinctive red, blue, and yellow Exprezit insignia and had to check it out, though it was gated off. Only in the last two years was the gas island canopy demolished so there has been some activity of some sort going on; I would guess it was for the early stages of a building renovation that never happened.

As I never got to go inside an Exprezit in their heyday, I have no idea what their draw was especially as they tried to expand west. Their stores were in old, pre-existing locations, tired by even 2002 standards, and didn't supplement them with trendy new restaurant co-brand locations as was in vogue in those days.

Thank you for reading! As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I will try to make a 50-50 mix of Carbon-izer or other legacy content mixed with entirely new content.

MarketPlace Shopping Center (Temple, Texas)

I would say this does more business than Temple Mall next door.
I've been trying to think of what to do for this site. I bounced around ideas (soft reboot and focus on a more consistent topic, refocusing on stuff off of highways instead of anything, a Texas-exclusive focus) but in the end I thought what I had been doing, is doing posts on a very small selection of buildings, not large directories, meaning posts like this will have to be broken up or removed. Already I did stuff like spin off Big's Meat Market from a larger Buda/Kyle topic.

As part of this new revamp, the focus is on MarketPlace Shopping Center in Temple. I've uploaded a PDF of the shopping center as of 2025 here (archived from here and wanted to discuss a few of the major tenants in more detail, particularly H-E-B, Kohl's, and the restaurants out front. It recycles content from Carbon-izer.com as well, though the future posts will have more care taken for them.

The Kohl's (located at 3170 S. 31st Street) started out as a Woolco in 1980 (moving from an I-35 location), then after the entire Woolco chain folded, it became a Montgomery Ward in 1983 and operating to the end of the chain's life (early 2001) but remained with signage up a few years afterward. The Kohl's opened in September 2011 according to this article and should be noted that as Montgomery Ward, its address was 3002A S. 31st Street. H-E-B is the other major anchor (opened in 1980) and I've been to it at least once, and it's been renovated more than once. I believe it was last renovated in the mid-2010s (before that, carrying circa-2000 decor) though I don't know the details of the store's opening. Many of the older tenants carry the 3002 address like H-E-B but the modern ones like Kohl's no longer do.

The three restaurants out front are also of interest.

Photo from Showcase.
The Whataburger (1415 SW H K Dodgen Loop) is perhaps the most interesting. I remember stopping at this location sometime in late 2016 or early 2017 after a day of outside work at a ranch. While the cold drink and the protein of the hamburger revived my spirits, I was intrigued by the large, "Playplace" part of the building, as if it had a playground at one point. The room was closed to the public (it was used as employee offices/storage, apparently) and while the thought of Whataburger having a playground wasn't out of the question (I seem to recall a kid's meal mascot, for instance) it hadn't actually occurred to me that it was in fact not a Whataburger to begin with, having been a Burger King opened in 1999 but closed within a decade. It was seized by U.S. Marshals in November 2004 (it did not reopen) and in November 2007 was reopened as a Whataburger. Before Whataburger was built, a Pizza Hut was here from 1991 to 1997. Before that I'm not sure, if anything, what was there. Next to it is Starbucks (1313 SW H K Dodgen Loop), opened as Golden Fried Chicken (Golden Chick) in 1999 and became Starbucks around April 2004 (I believe Golden Chick closed late 2003). You can see another photo of the Starbucks at StarbucksEverywhere.net. Finally, Taco Bell, at 1201 SW H K Dodgen Loop is the oldest of the three, and had changed its store number store number (2308) and address (3002 South 31st Street, the number of the whole plaza) in 2014 to the Dodgen Loop address and a new store number (30125) without rebuilding. Despite looking nothing like the original 1983 store, BCAD indicates the building is original to 1983 (just expanded).