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…