Cavender's Boot City (San Marcos, Texas)

Picture by author, December 2022
The new update to Carbon-izer is just a few days away, and a huge part of it will be the city directories, with featured updates for Houston in particular with dozens of new entries. But for the Austin area ones, there's not nearly that number. A while back, I redid a page for Austin and Interstate 35 and in the process, cut out the San Marcos entries, including Cavender's Boot City.

While this particular store is an outlot of the Tanger Outlets outlet mall (and here since 2000) the Cavender's Boot City has an even more colorful sign that the Houston 290 one (when that sign has worked, and it's been a bit flaky as of late). I'm not sure on the blue hat but it's definitely one of my favorites and these are cool signs. The picture, even when zoomed in, doesn't do it justice. (4331 S. Interstate 35, San Marcos). Hopefully I'll cover Tanger Outlets a bit more in the future...

Former Super Saver Wholesale Warehouse Club of Memphis (Memphis, Tennessee)

Picture from Loopnet, as a Garden Ridge.
I came across this in Eastern Memphis, it's an At Home (rebranded Garden Ridge) now but sure doesn't look like it started out as such. Indeed it did not. While the Loopnet link above says the building was built in 1972, it actually opened in October 1986 as Super Saver Wholesale Warehouse Club, a new chain launched by Alton Howard after Howard's BranDiscount liquidated (still based out of Monroe, Louisiana). In Memphis, this opened in October 1986, but sadly was short-lived, as the chain was sold to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in 1987, and in summer 1987 it closed for a new Sam's Wholesale Club, which in turn moved out in 1994 after a failed attempt to own the building instead of just leasing it. Instead it was leased to Garden Ridge, which moved in around 1995 and became At Home in the mid-2010s.

The Real Superstore (Lafayette, Louisiana)

Courtesy The Daily Advertiser of Lafayette (Newspapers.com).
In a bit of a course reversal since around last October, no longer will this alternate between "directory breakup" posts and "new" posts. However, this post is still similar to older ones in that it exports a stand-alone post originally made on Carbon-izer.com, Lafayette's The Real Superstore, a large supermarket in Lafayette, Louisiana that operated between 1985 and 1996 (apart from a brief closure in 1995). It's since been replaced with a movie theater known as The Grand Lafayette today.