08/31/11 11:29pm

Today was opening day for the third-ever Joe V’s Smart Shop, H-E-B’s growing chain of low-cost supermarkets. How low-cost are we talking? Well, put it this way: Checkers at the store won’t even touch your money. That’s right: You’ll be sliding it into a Wincor Nixdorf iCash register yourself — it sucks up your bills and coins and spits back change. And for a good number of the groceries you buy, you’ll be unpacking the items yourself too, directly from the boxes they were shipped in — just like you would at a big-box warehouse store. In the 51,000-sq.-ft. space carved out of a former Kmart at 12009 Northwest Fwy., on the west side of Hwy. 290 at 43rd St., the boxes and pallets are the displays:

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06/02/11 3:36pm

Any truth to the rumor — a reader wants to know — that the former Kmart space near the Burlington Coat Factory in the shopping center on the west side of Hwy. 290 near 43rd St. is going to be a brand-new H-E-B Market? Some, it turns out. It’s going to be the third-ever Joe V’s Smart Shop, H-E-B’s Scott McClelland tells Swamplot. (The first Joe V’s — H-E-B’s new bigger-store-with-less-stuff-for-less-money grocery format — opened last year on Antoine near Veterans Memorial.) A fourth Joe V’s is slated for the northern reaches of Shepherd Dr. near I-45, at Victory Dr.

Photo: Swamplot inbox