H-E-B opened its doors in Murphy at 6 a.m. Wednesday, at 740 E. FM 544 and McCreary Road. It’s the retailer’s fourteenth location in the DFW Metroplex once Central Market and Joe V’s Smart Shop are counted alongside the namesake stores, and proof of how fast a company that avoided North Texas for most of its existence is now making up for lost time.
The store runs 122,000 square feet and cost roughly $53 million to build. Inside: a True Texas BBQ restaurant smoked in-house for more than fourteen hours, a Sushiya sushi counter, a full pharmacy with a drive-thru, curbside and home delivery, and a fuel station with a car wash. It’s H-E-B’s sixth flagship store in Collin County and is expected to employ around 600 people. At the groundbreaking, the company donated $10,000 each to five Murphy-area nonprofits, a pattern it repeats at nearly every new store.
H-E-B’s first DFW namesake store didn’t open until 2022, in Frisco, decades after the chain had already blanketed South and Central Texas. Central Market got here earlier, in 2001, but the H-E-B brand itself stayed out entirely until recently. Since Frisco, the pace has been relentless: Plano, McKinney, Allen, Alliance, Mansfield, Melissa, Prosper, Rockwall, Forney, a second Frisco store, Euless, Irving last month, and now Murphy. Three Joe V’s Smart Shop locations have opened in Dallas and Irving since 2024, and six Central Market stores now serve Dallas, Plano, Southlake, and Fort Worth.
Dallas proper is still waiting on its first true H-E-B. The company owns land at Hillcrest Road and LBJ Freeway for a future store, but no groundbreaking date is set. Until then, the city gets by on three Central Markets and a Joe V’s, while the suburbs keep adding H-E-B storefronts at a pace reshaping a market long dominated by Kroger, Tom Thumb, and Walmart.
The company’s backstory reads nothing like a modern retail empire. H-E-B traces back to November 26, 1905, when Florence Butt invested $60 to open a grocery store on the ground floor of her family’s rented home in Kerrville, her husband too sick with tuberculosis to work. Her sons delivered orders first by baby carriage, then by a horse-drawn wagon. In 1919, her youngest son, Howard Edward Butt, took over and eventually renamed it H.E. Butt Grocery. More than a century later, the company is still headquartered in San Antonio, still majority-owned by the Butt family, and pulls in north of $50 billion a year across more than 470 stores in Texas and Mexico.
Murphy had roughly 3,000 residents twenty years ago and has grown past 21,000 today. H-E-B doesn’t build 122,000-square-foot stores in places it doesn’t expect to keep growing.
