This summer, two seniors from the local high school pranked the town of Sealy by planting an “H-E-B Coming Soon” sign in an empty lot. To hear Bill Atkinson, the executive director of the Sealy Economic Development Corporation, talk about it, residents went into a jubilant frenzy: They blew up his phone lines with calls about when the store would arrive and flocked to Facebook to pontificate about butter tortillas. By early evening, the two seniors revealed that it was all a prank. A spokesperson from H-E-B told me that while the company is “humbled by the enthusiasm our customers have for our brand,” it does “not have plans for a store in Sealy.”

But an H-E-B in Sealy isn’t so impossible to imagine. As greater Houston continues its march beyond the western suburb of Katy to Sealy, the

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