Less than a week after officially opening as downtown Baton Rouge’s first full-service grocery store in nearly 50 years, Matherne’s Supermarket already is expanding its hours—staying open two hours later each night—as it tries to keep up with the demand from customers who have been overwhelmingly supportive of the new store.
“We’re doing it because people asked for it,” says general manager Bill Hounshell. “We had thought we’d be slow in the evenings. We were wrong. That’s been one of our busiest times of day.”
The 16,000-square-foot grocery store—located on the ground floor of the former Capital One Building, now called 440 on Third—already is exceeding the sales volume projections its owners had hoped to meet a number of months from now, once the store was established.
Hounshell says the store is drawing from a broader geographic region than originally anticipated, and has been selling more prepared food during lunch and dinner hours than originally expected. The biggest surprise has been the amount of sushi sales, Hounshell says. The downtown location is averaging about 150 sales per day.
“That’s more sushi in a day than our other stores sell in one week,” he says.
The store is expected to have a grand opening celebration in early March. Its new hours of operation are 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and 8 a.m. on 6 p.m. on Sunday.
—Stephanie Riegel
