El Paso not H-E-B’s bag?

Experts explain why far-flung city may not be in store for the retailer

H-E-B has stores in towns as small as Carthage and Crockett, a pair of East Texas locales with fewer than 15,000 residents — combined.

So why hasn’t the San Antoniobased grocer expanded to El Paso, the state’s sixth-largest metro area?

“We’re very confused,” said Bonny Tallmon, an El Paso resident who started a Facebook page called “Bring HEB to El Paso” in 2013.

The company has been growing rapidly elsewhere. It operates more than 430 stores in Texas and Mexico, primarily in South and Central Texas, along the Gulf Coast, and south of the border in the northeastern states of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas.

But even as it continues pushing into the Dallas-Fort Worth area — where new stores open to customers who line up early to get in — and expanding its footprint around San Antonio, it appears to be bypassing El Paso. That doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon.

“While (we) don’t have any immediate expansion plans for El Paso, we’re always looking for opportunities to serve more Texans and communities across the state,” a spokesperson for H-E-B said.

The company declined to make an executive available to discuss why it’s been bypassing El Paso, which has a population of about 675,000 and another 200,000 or so residents in the surrounding area. But retail experts and economists say the reasons include the city’s far-flung location, its residents’ incomes and slow population growth.

Per capita incomes in El Paso and Las Cruces, a nearby city in New Mexico, are lower than those in Texas and the U.S. as a whole, and population growth in those cities is moderate or slowing, said

H-E-B H-E-B has a groundbreaking ceremony in November 2022 for a new store in Fort Worth. The grocery giant has been pushing into North Texas and expanding elsewhere, but still has no locations in El Paso.

Photo illustration by Monte Bach/Staff