8
MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
JULY | AUGUST 2014
M
y Rouses is not your typical grocery store. Heck, my Rouses
is not your typical Rouses.
No matter what kind of store you’re talking about, if you locate it at
the corner of Royal and St. Peter Streets in the French Quarter, it’s
going to be … unique.
This corner is abuzz with human activity. Ghost tours meet right
behind my Rouses at night, in front of the voodoo shop and across
the street from Preservation Hall, where the line winds all the way
down the block. Down 50 paces, Johnny White’s bar is teeming
with stories of love gone wrong.
A band is almost always playing outside my Rouses front door, and
it’s hardly ever the same band that was playing there last time you
went, and sometimes Royal Street is closed to automobile traffic and
sometimes it’s not, but either way people are standing in the way.
Of traffic. Of bikes and buggies. Of each other.
And that’s outside my Rouses. Check out the inside.
There are not a lot of kids at my Rouses. My Rouses does not have
many soccer moms. There are many reasons for that, the primary
one being that there’s no place to park an SUV at my Rouses.
My Rouses doesn’t have a parking lot. It doesn’t have a public
bathroom or a water fountain. It doesn’t have fresh fish laid out on
ice like the rest of the Rouses markets and it doesn’t have a lobster
tank and it doesn’t have those big shiny helium balloons with the
image of a kitty-kat that says: Get Well Soon!
My Rouses is only 8,000 square feet.
At my Rouses, there are no grocery carts lined up outside for you
to pick and push through the store. There aren’t any inside either.
There are no grocery carts at all at my Rouses.
The aisles are very narrow. Very. Unless they are very, very small —
say three or four-years-old, two people cannot pass each other in the
aisles of my Rouses without at least one, and probably both them,
making exaggerated sideways moves like people do in stadiums or
the
Gulf Coast
issue
My
ROUSES
by
Chris Rose +
photo by
Frank Aymami
