This Grocery Store Proved Itself To Be A Good Neighbor

HEB owns 340 grocery stores, most of them located in the state of Texas. They advertise themselves as being a good neighbor to Texans. During the winter crisis last week, one of those stores got a chance to prove that.

Let me preface this post by saying, HEB groceries have done their best to help its customers during the pandemic. They gave their employees a raise to stay on the job, and they have required both customers and employees to wear mask. They have also installed plexiglass shields to keep employees and customers from infecting each other.

When freezing weather, accompanied by lots of snow and ice, struck the state, they stayed open to make sure their customers had groceries to survive during the disaster. But one of their stores had to go above and beyond for their customers

Last Tuesday, there were a couple of hundred customers in the Leander store trying to get groceries to survive the horrible weather. Leander is a suburb just northwest of Austin. As the customers were filling their carts, the unthinkable happened. The electricity went off, leaving them in the dark. 

It also meant that the store's cash registers, scanners, and credit/debit machines would not work (since they require electricity. What were they to do?

They could have just told those customers they couldn't buy any groceries since the electricity was off. But they understood that these people, who had come out in freezing conditions with ice and snow, needed those groceries.

So the store made a decision. They let all of those customers take the groceries home without paying for them. This cost the store some money, but it also proved they were a good neighbor that cared about their customers.

Those customers got online and told their friends what the store had done, and word of it spread like wildfire. It even reached the folks at The Washington Post -- and they wrote an article about the stores generosity and caring.

The store did it to help their customers out of a very bad situation. But it turns out, they got some nice public relations out of their generous gesture. You couldn't buy better public relations from a national newspaper!

NOTE -- In the interest of full disclosure, I need to tell you I have been a customer of HEB since moving to the Austin area. The store in Leander is not where I shop, but it's only a few miles from where I live.