Sanborns

Founding

Walter Sanborn, a licensed pharmacist from California, moved to Mexico in 1898 and worked in a Mexico City apothecary before his brother Frank joined him. In September 1903 the brothers opened their own drugstore, the Sanborns American Pharmacy, at 6 San Francisco Street (now Madero Street) near the Alameda; the business took the name Sanborn Hermanos (Sanborn Brothers) in 1907. The company dates its founding to June 19, 1903. In 1910 the brothers imported a soda fountain from the United States, the first in the country, and the drugstore grew into a restaurant. Early branches were on what is now Madero Street and on 16 de Septiembre street, and the brothers also opened a store in Tampico.

During the Mexican Revolution the store was damaged by soldiers in 1914 but stayed open as neutral ground. A photograph from the Casasola archive shows Sanborns waitresses serving Zapatista soldiers. Troops of Emiliano Zapata used the Sanborns branch on the site of today's Librería Madero as a meeting place, and photographs show Zapatista soldiers eating at its lunch counter.

The company's trademark of three owls is said to represent Frank Sanborn and his sons, Francis and Jonathan.

Casa de los Azulejos

In January 1919 the Sanborns rented the Casa de los Azulejos (House of Tiles), a colonial mansion faced with Talavera tiles that had been the home of the Counts of the Valle de Orizaba and later the Jockey Club, and that stood empty after briefly housing the Casa del Obrero Mundial. After a restoration, the new store opened on October 11, 1919, with a drugstore, restaurant, tea room, soda fountain, candy counter and gift shop. The former central courtyard became the main dining room. In 1925 José Clemente Orozco painted the mural Omnisciencia on the main staircase, commissioned by the building's owner, Francisco Sergio de Iturbe. Sanborns bought the building from the Iturbe family in 1978. From the early 1920s Sanborns also sold silverwork, and by the early 1940s its silver sales reached $250,000 a year.

Walgreen ownership

In 1946 Frank Sanborn sold the business. The published price was 13 million pesos (US$2.6 million), and the sale included the name, with Sanborn agreeing not to use it for another business; at the time the company had its Madero Street store in Mexico City and a branch in Monterrey. The Walgreen Company of Chicago bought jointly with a Mexico City investment bank, as Mexican law required majority Mexican ownership. Walgreen took about 23 percent of the shares for $613,000, with an option to raise its stake to about half, and ran the company under a management contract; most of the other shares were held by Mexican investors. It was Walgreen's first foreign acquisition. Walgreen's stake was 47 percent by 1955 and 49 percent by 1966.

Under Walgreen the chain expanded beyond the historic center. A Sanborns café, the Café del Prado, opened in 1949, and branches on Paseo de la Reforma and on Lafragua street followed in 1954; the Lafragua branch, near the offices of the Chamber of Deputies, became a meeting place for politicians. The company also ran its own candy factory and a large restaurant in a Mexico City hotel. By 1966 it had seven stores in Mexico City and one in Monterrey, with annual sales of about $20 million. Sanborns opened in Acapulco in 1966 and in Puebla in 1969, when it had 12 outlets; it had 17 by 1971. In August 1976 it bought 80 percent of 18 Denny's restaurants in five Mexican cities, which were later converted to Sanborns Café, and it operated 44 outlets including those restaurants in 1980.

Grupo Carso

In August 1984 Walgreen sold its 46.9 percent stake for $30 million to a group of Mexican investors; the buyers included Carlos Slim's Grupo Carso, which held a majority of the shares by 1985. By 1995 there were 86 Sanborns and 35 Sanborns Café units, and the company had taken a majority interest in the music retailers Mix-Up and Discolandia. Sanborns is now one of several formats of Grupo Sanborns, Grupo Carso's retail division, alongside Sears, Dax, Mixup and iShop.

The chain expanded to Central America with a store at Multiplaza in Panama City, which opened in 2007 at a cost of US$6 million and closed in January 2020 after falling sales. Its two stores in San Salvador, at Metrocentro and Multiplaza, closed later that year.

In Mexico the number of Sanborns stores fell slightly from 169 in 2013 to 167 in 2018, while analysts pointed to competition from other department stores and restaurants. Several long-standing branches in Mexico City closed in the following years, among them Lafragua in 2018 and San Ángel in 2020; Carlos Slim later attributed both closures to high rents. In 2025 the company closed two Sanborns Café restaurants in Mexico City as part of what it called a rationalization of stores. The number of Sanborns stores rose by one in 2025, to 141, while Sanborns Café fell from 17 to 14.

Notable closed branches

• Tíber a.k.a. Sanborns del Ángel (Mexico City): The branch at Paseo de la Reforma 333 at the corner of Río Tíber, listed by the company as "Tíber" but popularly called the "Sanborns del Ángel", faced the Angel of Independence from the ground floor of the Edificio Bolivia, an office building by José Villagrán García that formed part of Antenor Patiño's Hotel María Isabel complex and housed the Mexican headquarters of Ford. The site had previously been occupied by the townhouse of George T. Braniff, built between 1912 and 1919 and demolished around 1960; Sanborns moved into the corner space in 1968. For half a century the store looked on as crowds gathered at the monument for football celebrations and political rallies, and in the 1980s it was a well-known meeting place for the city's gay community. It had closed by mid-2018, when the chain was operating eleven fewer stores than a year earlier. In February 2025 Carlos Slim said the branch had been given up because it had no parking and the landlord wanted to double the rent. The space is now occupied by a Citibanamex branch and a Shake Shack.
• Casa Boker (Mexico City), opened in 1976 in the historic Casa Boker building on Isabel la Católica street; closed in 2024.
• Lafragua (Mexico City), opened in 1954 near the offices of the Chamber of Deputies and the headquarters of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, and a center of political breakfasts in the 1970s and 1980s; closed in 2018.
• San Ángel (Mexico City), near Parque de la Bombilla and one of the oldest branches in the city; closed in 2020.
• Panama City (2007–2020) and two stores in San Salvador (closed 2020).