Southern Season (Richmond, Virginia)

Southern Season in its second phase of life. This was LL Flooring's own photo (source).
When Southern Season opened in July 2014 in the new Libbie Mill development of Richmond, Virginia (2250 Staples Mill Road), it was unlike anything the city had seen. Despite being around 53,000 square feet, comparable to other supermarkets, the gourmet market lacked traditional departments like produce, milk, bread, or eggs, it made up for it with over 80,000 items (10,000 of which came from Virginia) with all sorts of sauce, coffee varieties, tea blends, cheeses, craft beers, and kitchen gadgets. The response was positive and the gourmet grocer seemed like a great anchor to the development...but it was not meant to be. Less than two years later, Southern Season announced it would close its Richmond location in April 2016, with the parent company indicating the store was still too large to be profitable and future stores, such as one in Atlanta, being around half the size. The Atlanta store never opened as in June of that year Southern Season declared bankruptcy. Their first and now only store in Chapel Hill, North Carolina would announce its closure a few years later, leaving Southern Season just another online retailer.

A few years later, the building (now under the address of 4901 Bakers Mill Lane) was leased by Lumber Liquidators as their new headquarters and received a full interior renovation. A few years later, Lumber Liquidators rebranded as LL Flooring...and a few years after that, went bankrupt. The whole chain was days away from "Lumber liquidating" itself and its 400+ stores when it was saved by a last-minute deal by the original founder. Along with half the chain, the headquarters didn't make it unscathed and shortly afterwards the newly-reverted Lumber Liquidators announced it would pack up and move the headquarters to its distribution center. Still, hope springs eternal--just about a week ago as of this writing, it is to become a location of ACAC Fitness & Wellness.

575 FM 150 East (Kyle, Texas)

Google Street View from 2019. The Family Dollar would be a Dollar Tree by year-end. I'm continuing to work off of this page (Big's Meat Market spun off already) and I wanted to spin off another entry, 575 FM 150 East (well, Ranch to Market 150 at least), a strip center composed of several buildings. (It's all part of upgrades at this site.) From south to north there's Money & More Pawn (a separate building, this was here at least since 2015), Dollar Tree (another separate building; this opened as a Family Dollar around December 2006 but in 2019 it was closed and converted to a Dollar Tree), a third building with Lone Star Pediatric Dental & Braces - Kyle, Kyle Donuts, a branch of Austin Texas Martial Arts Centers (formerly home of Kyle Care Pharmacy), Liquor House, Papa John's, Kid to Kid (children's clothing resale), Absolute Life Wellness Center (a chiropractor office), and Garcia's Mexican Restaurant.

Google Maps Link

The Andersons Retail Store (Maumee, Ohio)

530 Illinois Avenue in happier times Agribusiness company The Andersons for years ran a small chain of retail stores, described as having an eclectic mix of food, agricultural supplies, and general merchandise (mostly hard goods) and Maumee's store was the first, opening a 155,000 square foot retail store at 530 Illinois Avenue in 1972 to replace a small sales office nearby (their headquarters are located nearby). They built several stores, including a grocery-only store in Sylvania, but in early 2017 they announced that after several years of losses the retail stores would close permanently. Yelp reviews and articles indicate that there were at least two subleases, Tony Packo's and a meats section operated by local operator House of Meats.

A few years later, The Andersons reopened the property as a warehouse.

Rattlers' Navasota (Navasota, Texas)

I only have Google Maps Street View (this one is c. 2013), so it's a bit distorted. There's a self-serve car wash off to the left that's part of the property.

Rattlers' has previously been a discussion topic of mine, a local convenience store that was later absorbed into 7-Eleven (with the stores still bearing its name cut out of the chain, however), and in 1990 an Exxon was built there (Jim's Express Mart, but listing for "Hit & Run" stores also comes up). By 2004 the store's owner, Kolkhorst Petroleum, unified the convenience stores it owned at the time by giving them a common brand, Rattlers' Country Stores. Despite having the oldest ownership in the chain, outliving a few other stores that Kolkhorst had previously owned including some stores in the Waco-Temple-Killeen, and of course, being right near Kolkhorst's offices, it only became Rattlers' #2. Store #1 was sold within a few years. On the Highway 6 side of the store there was a sign for "Rattlers' Deli" but state tax records indicate from 1999 to 2003 there was a Taco Bell Express inside the store (I believe by the time of the Rattlers' rebrand this was gone). In 2016, Kolkhorst Petroleum sold its stores to Sunoco (owner of Stripes) but Rattlers' stores never got rebranded to Stripes because the Stripes chain was sold to 7-Eleven a few years later, and within a few years was branded as 7-Eleven (as did the Stripes an exit down). This was also the first place I saw the new lower-case Exxon logo in late 2017, a sign of things to come. (At least the blue stripe-less version didn't last long before they added back the blue stripe).

This post was split off from this post as part of ongoing upgrades to the site.

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 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.

UPDATE 09-04-2025: The more I look at this location (2982 Pat Thomas Pkwy.) from the past, it looked like it could be a Stuckey's, between its offerings and logos. Indeed, it does seem to be listed here in a 1992 directory!