1624 West Waco Drive was originally built as a Payless Gas, a convenience store chain owned by Strasburger Enterprises (the actual gas brand is unknown--they all used different gas brands) in 1985. It's been mentioned at a few of my other pages on Waco at Carbon-izer (at 1020 N. Loop 340 and at 901 South 5th Street). I never knew Payless Gas as Strasburger Enterprises sold the entire 64-store chain to Diamond Shamrock in 19911, whereupon they converted to Corner Store, Diamond Shamrock's in-house store brand. When Diamond Shamrock stores started to be converted to Valero around the mid-2000s Corner Store was their preferred brand (winning out over Stop-N-Go in Houston, which they also owned) and ultimately spun off Corner Store as CST Brands, though despite a promising start was purchased by Circle K (all of this happened within a decade or so). Unfortunately this Corner Store never got to see Circle K. In 2006, Valero sold the store to an independent (just labeled as "Food Mart") but within a few years was picked up and remodeled as Chevron with a new sign (the brick base for the old sign still stood) and a coat of paint. Within a decade this too was abandoned and in 2020 remodeled as "Be'ur Mart" with its own mascot on the signage (that looks like it was stolen from somewhere). Nevertheless, the Payless Gas legacy still exists in Waco, carrying on as Circle K.
1. It seems that not ALL of the Payless Gas stores were sold, and Strasburger Enterprises would later go back to convenience store in the mid-1990s with Quix. These were sold to 7-Eleven in 2012.
No comments:
Post a Comment