July_Aug_2015_FINAL_62215_bleedless REV

HURRICANES • ROUSES HISTORY

Jeremy Simmons, Store Director

really been neglected. We cleaned them and fixed them up and added 4,000 local products before we reopened them one and two at a time.We kept every A&P and Sav- A-Center employee who wanted a job. Marcy Nathan, Creative Director When the doors opened on our first New Orleans store — Carrollton in Mid City — I was first in line for the second line. Like so many New Orleanians, I lost everything in Katrina. I had been working with Rouses for three years, and my friends and colleagues immediately stepped in to help me. But it wasn’t until Rouses stepped in to replace Sav-A-Center that that I knew things would be okay. Rouses kept stores in neighborhoods that desperately needed them, and jobs in Louisiana andMississippi.

I was a store manager for Sav-A-Center when Rouses took over the stores in Louisiana and Mississippi. Rouses didn’t just come in and clean up the stores, they built up variety, they added staff, they responded to customer request —you knew Rouses was local. Customers were excited that a local company took over; employees were excited that a local company took over. I was never so proud to be a local. Slidell Donny Rouse Rouses on Gause Boulevard opened in November, 2006, fourteen months after Katrina, less than a year after we opened

the Rouses in Mandeville. It was our fourth epicurean-style store. Pa helped Slidell firemen, police and EMT’s raise the flag in our parking lot in honor of Hurricane Katrina’s first responders. It was a very emotional moment for everyone.

HURRICANE GUSTAV Ali Rouse Royster

Hurricane Gustav came ashore as a category 2 in Cocodrie, a small fishing community south of Houma, in September, 2008. It was the first major storm threat since Katrina, and most of our area evacuated. As soon as the storm passed, those who stayed behind started looking for supplies. Most of our family was still in town, so we did what Rouses do, we opened our grocery store. There were enough of us, plus a few of our team members who were around and ready towork— includingmy now-husband Billy, an accountant who came to stock shelves to pitch in — to open our store on North Canal in Thibodaux. I took charge of our cash registers, teaching some of my family how to ring up groceries for the first time (my cousin Chris Acosta brought me his till at the end of the day with crumpled up money all mixed up). My dad even ran a register for a while, which was fun for me to watch. It had probably been 25 years since he had done that. Pa was there overseeing it all and was beaming from ear to ear. He talked about it for months, and you could tell how proud he was that we could still run a store with mostly just family after all those years. He passed away a little over 6 months later, and I have no doubt that this was one of the many, many stories he shared with his cousin Ciro when they met again.

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