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12
MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
JULY | AUGUST 2015
the
Anniversary
issue
HURRICANE KATRINA
Donald Rouse
We had thirteen stores down after Katrina,
and our stores in Metairie had been looted
top to bottom. We were as much at ground
zero as anyone in the industry.
Remember how bad your refrigerator
smelled after Katrina? Every store smelled
like that, only one hundred times worse.
Imagine whole meat counters, dairy cases
— tops had popped off the milk because of
the heat. All of the frozen food had melted
and there was ice cream all over the floor.
We had fruit flies everywhere.
But we were lucky that we weren’t personally
affected like so many of our customers,
employees and their families.
Chris Rose
Widespread skepticism about the sincerity
and commitment of some beloved longtime
institutions was confirmed when they never
reopened, or worse, relocated to other
cities. In the interest of equanimity and
absolution after all these years — the guilty
shall remain nameless.They know who they
were. We all know who they were.
Donald Rouse
As locals, it was hard to watch national
companies leave after Katrina. We never
once thought about not rebuilding. It was
important that local companies like ours
invested in the state. We got all but one
store up and running very quickly. Our new
Mandeville location, an epicurean-style
market, was scheduled to open early Fall
2005. It took a few extra months, but we
made it before the end of the year.
The big leap came when we signed a deal
to acquire A&P’s Southern Division in
September 2007. We got our first stores in
Mississippi, and our company doubled in
size overnight. The stores we bought had
“There’s nothing you can do about it, but accept it. You take a good
cry and you keep going. And I always look at it this way ... bad things
happen, but you always get something good out of it.”
—Chef Leah Chase in a recent interview with The Times-Picayune on
the Katrina 10 year anniversary