The Devastation of Delchamps in Metairie, LA: Winn-Dixie #1329
The Bayou State says goodbye to a Mobile legacy.
Future ALDI
Winn-Dixie #1329 (2001-2026)
Delchamps #289: ~1995-2001
Lakewood Plaza | 211 Veterans Memorial Boulevard | Metairie, LA 70005
Greetings, class! I want to start off with an apology for my tardiness; I’m just returning from an extended vacation which didn’t allot time for me to tackle my pending post. Now that my time off has drawn to a close (and my short Anchorman diversion has ended), I plan to devote the rest of my time on this 767-300 to wrapping up this year’s Marketplace Madness series.
I also figure that now it is as good of a time as ever to reveal my inspiration for this year’s theme: Somebody Else’s Cart. While the straightforward application of Winn-Dixie taking residence inside of somebody else’s supermarket is obvious, the phrase is actually a play on a 2017 Lady Antebellum song titled “Somebody Else’s Heart.” It’s worth a listen if you’ve never heard it.
As fun as this has been, all good things must come to an end. Not only does this post mark the end of Marketplace Madness 2026: Somebody Else’s Cart, but it also showcases the end of an era: Winn-Dixie in Louisiana.
As of March 23, 2026, The Beef People no longer operate a single supermarket in Alabama, Louisiana, or Mississippi, following the closure of the final six stores in these states the day prior. Winn-Dixie #1329, in particular, closed for good three weeks prior on March 1, 2026, and was unceremoniously sent off into the sunset with a 7-day fixture liquidation blowout (While you’re at the Marketplace . . . the Facebook Marketplace).
All that remains of the 71 stores lost since 2023 is a set of 38 soon-to-be ALDI locations (including right here!), a number of unemployed associates, a whole host of memories, a few doppelgangers, and a random liquor store in Ocean Springs. Rest assured, folks, because I still have plenty of my own experiences to share from prior to March 22nd . . .
Before we get to any of that, we need to see how our theme of Somebody Else’s Cart fits into the story of former Winn-Dixie #1329. Likewise, we need to turn our clocks all the way back to 1963; I hope your flux capacitor is working!
Our tale begins with a long-forgotten (and largely unknown) New Orleans grocer: Ernst Food Mart.
Adolph Ernst Sr. and Adolph Ernst Jr. opened Ernst Food Mart #2 at 211 Veterans Memorial Highway on August 1st, 1963. The 17,000-square-foot fully air-conditioned supermarket featured, “fresh and frozen meats, fowl and seafood, barbecued items, Kosher foods, fancy foods, produce, frozen foods, dairy goods, bakery items, canned goods and imported and domestic wines, liquors and cordials,” which seems like quite the wide assortment for an independent grocer in the 1960’s. Then again, “fancy foods” likely encompassed modernly commonplace items such as balsamic vinegar and Swiss cheese.
“In addition to food items, the new store will also carry potted plants, housewares, phonograph records, magazines and greeting cards. A prescription drug department is also contained in the new facility.” The potted plants and phonograph records seem like a stretch, but the inclusion of a pharmacy in the space really threw me for a loop. The “combination” pharmacy & grocery stores that we think of today only gained traction with larger chains during the 1970’s (Kroger Superstores / Skaggs - Albertsons) and the 1980’s (Publix Food & Pharmacy / Winn-Dixie Marketplace). The Ernst family was seemingly well ahead of its time!
As for the Ernst chain, the New Orleans-based family operation traced its roots back to 1911 when Alfred L. Ernst opened his first store. Mr. & Mrs. Ernst seemingly lived above the grocery store until it was later expanded into a standalone supermarket. The company was passed down to Alfred H. and a store continued to be operated at 3911 Washington Avenue through at least the 1970’s.
I unfortunately could not find much regarding the family operation past the 1970’s (The Times-Picayune only runs through 1977 on Newspapers.com); however, I do know that Adolf H. Ernst, Sr. passed away in 1968 at the age of 59. His son would go on to join the military in 1975, which leaves the family business beyond this time in question.
One of the last mentions I found was when the Ernst Food Mart in Metairie was joined in 1970 by a Hancock Fabrics next door. Furthermore, the current owner of the parcel, ironically, is listed as “Ernst Properties Inc.” Whether or not this has any relation to the family of Adolf Ernst beats me, but the last listed sale was all the way back in 1992. At least a small piece of this parcel’s past continues on!
As for Winn-Dixie, the Florida-based chain traces its Cajun roots back to the year 1956.
The Beef People first entered the Bayou State through the purchase of New Orleans-based H.G. Hill Stores. The sale included 50 supermarkets spread across New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Hattiesburg, and Gulfport and was finalized on July 28th of that year. The Hill company dated back to 1922, which is notably 3 years before the Davis Family opened their first store in the Winn-Dixie lineage.
Winn-Dixie had a fruitful seven-decade run in the region – one could say it was plum delicious. Throughout this recent liquidation process, I’ve heard from countless readers about how important the grocer was to Louisiana and how much of a void will be left behind in its absence. It is also worth pointing out how store #1440 in Marrero (now a Rouses Market) was with the company for 66 of its 70 years in the state and was the chain’s fourth oldest supermarket at its time of closing. Louisiana notably had two of Winn-Dixie’s newest ground-up stores: #1443 in Covington (circa 2010) and #1472 in New Orleans (circa 2013).
I may not have paid #1440 or #1443 a visit, but I was fortunate enough to carve out a last minute lagniappe to see some of the WD’s other Louisiana stores before they closed (five of them, to be exact). One of those, of course, being the topic of today’s post.
In order to capture the full picture of this store, we need to examine one final former grocer: Alabama’s own Delchamps.
Our story with Delchamps begins in 1989, 68 years after the company’s founding. Upon researching my last post, I encountered quite the surprise: Bruno’s was the second Alabama-based grocer to have top executives perish in a plane crash.
On October 15, 1989, 58-year-old Delchamps chairman & CEO Alfred F. Delchamps, Jr. died in a fiery crash involving a World War II-era plane he and a friend purchased a week earlier. This was notably not the first time the two had flown the new plane.
Delchamps and pilot Mark Reynolds were flying the Vultee BT-13 in the Mobile area when they crashed near the community of Axis, Alabama. The two were reportedly practicing stunts when the plane’s engine stalled mid-flight. The plane crashed nose-first into a wooded area less than 150-feet from a home. The local paper reports that, “The fire burned so intensely at the crash site that area residents could not get close enough to remove the victims.”
It is undoubtedly a sad story to tell, given that both pilots died so young in such a violent manner. I can only imagine the grief that the families endured.
On the other hand, the loss of Delchamps’ chief executive caused a change in leadership direction. The 1990’s would prove to be a decade of drastic changes for the regional grocer; one has to wonder if things would have gone differently had the pair of pilots not embarked on that fateful October flight.
Randy Delchamps, cousin of Alfred, took the reins of the company following the plane crash and served until his resignation in 1995. The grocer was undergoing a period of turmoil leading up to Randy’s exit, with customers reporting higher prices, former employees claiming unjust firings, and executives citing increasing pressure from the competition. Oh, and there is also the fact that Randy, “led the board of directors to believe that the company’s Birmingham stores were profitable when in fact they were losing millions a year.” Delchamps reportedly lost $10 million in the first three quarters of 1995 alone, which meant something drastic needed to change. Outright lying to the board of directors was not a step in the right direction.
New blood from Albertsons, et. al. was brought into management with hopes to right the ship; this was for the first time in the company’s 74-year history that somebody without the Delchamps surname sat at the helm. In spite of the changes, the company still incurred unprecedented losses during the 1995 and 1996 fiscal years. Delchamps was hemorrhaging cash and in a downward spiral of its own. Meanwhile, company leaders continued to profess that Delchamps would not be sold.
Moreover, the supermarket continued to expand through this period, with notable new stores including the massive 62,000-square-foot superstore in Biloxi, Mississippi, and a similarly large store in Mandeville, Louisiana.
Part of this expansion also included the construction of a new store in, you guessed it, Metairie, Louisiana. Based on satellite imagery, the original Ernst Food Mart building stood tall and proud until the early-1990’s when it was razed along with several adjacent buildings for a redevelopment project. The new Delchamps Plaza was allegedly completed on the site between 1993 and 1995 and included a new 55,976-square-foot supermarket.
Following a 1995 majority purchase of Jackson-based Jitney Jungle, the New York-based investment firm Bruckmann, Rosser, Sherrill & Co. announced it intended to acquire Delchamps and roll the grocer into Jitney’s operations. The family eventually decided to sell (for two-dollars less per share than they were offered by A&P nine-years prior) given that the company was fleeting.
In 1997, Jitney, et. al. paid between $210-$250 million to acquire Delchamps’ 118 supermarkets, 10 liquor stores, and $38 million in debt. Remember that last point. Jitney Jungle, meanwhile, operated 105 grocery stores and 53 gas stations at the time.
A 2000 article in The Pensacola News Journal recaps many of the woes Delchamps encountered on its journey to doomsday, one of which should sound very familiar to my regular readers: “The Wall Street Journal, in a retrospective piece, attributed several management errors to Randy Delchamps’ reign. He was trying to turn a blue-collar chain upscale, by building too many fancy super-size stores, said the Journal. And then he raised prices.”
I was once told by an industry expert that Winn-Dixie’s biggest fault during the Marketplace era was the alienation of its core middle-class customer base. Conditional logic would lead one to believe that shoppers will always flock to a nicer, bigger, newer, store when presented the option; however, human nature tends to counteract that. People often stick with what is familiar – what is comfortable. It can be overwhelming to go from shopping at a small, slightly dated 30,000-square-foot grocery to store to being ‘overstimulated’ by, in Delchamps’ case, a superstore with, “new departments including a deli, self-serve yogurt bar, cheese/pizza island, video center, and floral department.”
Furthermore, the average blue-collar shopper does not have the extra disposable income to buy an overpriced yogurt parfait once a week, much less afford the newly inflated cost of everything else in the store resulting from the additional overhead. Easy and affordable is the name of the game for this key demographic.
On the other hand, higher-end shoppers are creatures of habit as well. You often will not catch them dead inside of a “dingy old” Delchamps or Winn-Dixie, despite the best efforts of these companies to make their stores feel upscale. The brands are too “low brow” for their tastes.
What these grocery stores ended up with was a lot of dept from financing store renovations that the clientele did not ask for and could not afford. That’s a lot of labor-intensive cold pizzas getting thrown out at the end of the day.
There was only one true blue-collar grocer success story from the 1990’s, and that is the Wal-Mart Supercenter. While Delchamps and Winn-Dixie were busy burning money on one-stop shopping with frills, Wal-Mart was methodically scaling a concept that the market craved: one-stop shopping with frugality. As we all know, there is nothing fancy or upmarket about the grocery aisles at a Wal-Mart; furthermore, the supercenters are gigantic. The kicker, though, is that Wal-Mart offered everyday low prices on staples and additional cost savings from minimal service departments at a place that the middle class was already visiting. This created the perfect storm to topple the other blundering players of the mid-market. Fear of having to “catch-up” ultimately contributed to the downfall of both Delchamps and Winn-Dixie.
In the end, though, it was the set of poorly-calculated M&A moves that would sink both grocers into bankruptcy. When reflecting on the Jitney-Delchamps merger, court testimony noted that Jitney Jungle was already in deeper debt than its acquisition target. When you add in Delchamps’ own $38 million note coupled with Jitney Jungle’s lack of market familiarity for Delchamps locations, you find that, “[Jitney] came in without doing their homework, and the sales degraded.”
“Jitney Jungle stores of America filed in bankruptcy court for protection from creditors on October 1999, listing debts of $660 million . . . Within a year, company officials decided to liquidate, announcing agreements October 30 to sell 89 grocery stores, 34 gas stations and five liquor stores to Winn-Dixie Stores Inc. and Bruno’s.” This deal, which closed in 2001, brought about the end of both the Delchamps & Jitney Jungle brands.
Out of the 68 grocery stores (originally 72) and 32 gas stations Winn-Dixie purchased, only four supermarkets (#1329, #1333, #1334, & #2626) would survive the 2005 and 2018 bankruptcy closure rounds. The vast majority of closures happened a mere four years after the Winn-Dixie acquisition closed, leading one to wonder what would have happened to The Beef People had they not taken on $85 million in additional debt in 2001. Was this the final nail in the 2005 bankruptcy’s coffin?
With that in mind, let’s explore what made this store so special.
I’ve heard reports that Winn-Dixie #1329 was one of the strongest stores in the region, if not in the entire chain. The supermarket allegedly made upwards of $750,000 in weekly gross sales, with some weeks ringing in closer to the million-dollar mark. Those numbers far exceeded my expectations and help to explain this store’s longevity.
Following its acquisition from Jitney Jungle, Winn-Dixie quickly converted this store to a Marketplace around 2001. It is unknown as to whether this change included a full-scale remodel or just a simple signage and branding swap (like the Sweetbay conversions from last decade). In any regard, the presence of the Marketplace moniker indicated that The Beef People thought highly of this location from the start.
This store underwent an extensive remodel in 2009 to don Winn-Dixie’s “Getting Better All the Time” interior as part of the company’s post-bankruptcy re-imaging campaign. The renovations included all new paint and signage in addition to new flooring and shelving throughout the store.
The store seemingly received another minor spruce-up around 2014 given the presence of aisle and category markers from Winn-Dixie’s “green interior.” I presume these changes were part of an aisle reorganization.
Other than the general layout, Winn-Dixie left no visible traces of Delchamps behind following the 2009 remodel.
This location’s final remodel happened in 2019 when The Beef People installed their signature red “Down Down” look. The grand reopening happened in August of that year.
Home to the famous Crystal hot sauce, the community of Metairie (pronounced MET-ər-ee) lies in Jefferson Parish just to the northwest of downtown New Orleans. Following European settlement, the locale was initially home to tenant farmers in the 1790’s and eventually followed much of the South in turning to sharecropping after the Civil War. The neighborhood is reportedly home to over 140,000 people today and has vastly changed over the last 200+ years; however, the area is still deeply rooted in its Creole culture.
I unfortunately didn’t have much time to spend in Metairie, but I thoroughly enjoyed my broader weekend in The Big Easy given that it was my first visit to the well-seasoned destination (and only my second to Louisiana).
Following a stroll down Bourbon Street, a photo at Jackson Square, and a beignet from Café Du Monde, I made my rounds at several local Winn-Dixie stores to get a taste of what made them special.
Upon first glance, this looked like an average supermarket. The keen-eyed amongst you probably noticed that the store’s “pharmacy” signage was removed as part of the 2023 program liquidation, but there was otherwise nothing jarring about the supermarket’s brick exterior. The thing is, though, there was something more unique hiding in plain sight (and it wasn’t the old Redbox machine).
If you make it past the alligator drawn in the store’s window, you’ll notice a protrusion centered on the building’s front wall, just beyond the cart coral and planters. That hexagonal space is one of the defining architectural features of a Delchamps store from the 1990’s, despite the fact that I’m oblivious to its intended purpose. Did it provided refuge to a manager behind the customer service desk?
Once inside, I was caught off guard by how the floral department was given its own isolated room, of sorts, just to the right of the doors. It was quite large. The liquor department was positioned in a mirrored space at the opposite set of doors (which I totally missed during my visit).
Something that I didn’t miss was the prominent display of Christmas items on clearance greeting me at the door. This was still the first of January; however, I feel like that stuff should have been at the back of the store rather than the front.
Reminiscent of many other supermarkets from the era (especially Winn-Dixie), this former Delchamps hosted its produce department under a lower ceiling height in the front right corner of the building. It was still quite the bright space, if you ask me.
Turning around, we see the rows of cash registers accented by a grand vaulted ceiling. I have to wonder if this vault once featured an even grander faux skylight.
Winn-Dixie remodels between 2007 and 2020 typically added a special natural & organic food section between the produce and beer departments. This store was no exception to that trend; however, Louisiana locations like this went one step further by adding a local flavor aisle into the mix. This WD was “keepin’ it local” by proudly displaying regional spices, rices, and beers. They even had some special bayou-themed decorations atop the refrigerators!
Making our way to the back of the store, we find the seafood counter and meat department. Around 2016, then-new Winn-Dixie CEO Ian McLeod began to usher in a whole host of changes to the company, including a full refresh to the storied brand image. Joining the new logo was a new slogan, “prices down and staying down,” and a new interior look for stores that was highly reminiscent of McLeod’s former employer back in Australia (heck, I even found a virtual copy of Winn-Dixie #7’s “deluxe” interior over there). That “Down Down” interior was used by Winn-Dixie through 2020, with the only major change being the introduction of wood paneling (as we see above) over certain service departments with later remodels.
We return to standard painted walls over the rest of the store, including those advertising “wine & beer” or “produce” over aisle one – home to the famous Chek Cola. Somehow, the ceiling miraculously gained several feet in height over here.
Likewise, the lower ceilings continued around the perimeter of the store and over the butcher counter. It has been a long time since I’ve seen a Winn-Dixie not cover its butcher case with a decal, and you would think that such a high volume store could have supported a better meat display.
Furthermore, I was shocked by how worn this store looked for it reportedly being such a high performer. It was presentable enough, but the circa 2009 flooring really showed its age as many other fixtures appeared past their prime. The gaudy red walls did not help matters.
Thankfully, the miniature jugs of milk were still in date. Have you ever seen those before? They have such a cute little shape.
Due to the multiple ceiling heights, most sections in this store ended up with dueling department signs: a strange sight, in my opinion.
The deli and bakery space also appears quite large when juxtaposed against the insanely low ceiling height. Those low ceilings have a way of making everything in this store look small!
Meanwhile, I had the hardest time getting a decent shot of this space thanks to a mother & daughter who were taking their sweet time exploring the sinful treats. I eventually prevailed.
My dawdling, likewise, afforded me the chance to check out the “Grab N’ Geaux” cooler (those Cajuns geaux crazy with their spelling sometimes) and equally colloquial plastic gumbo spoons.
The last department we’ll explore looked quite beautiful, if you ask me; just take a look at that tunnel of lunch meat.
Our time at the “Vets” store may be drawing to a close, but like Winn-Dixie’s tenure in The Crescent City, all good things must eventually come to a close. Lucky for you, the rewards don’t stop here!
On top of the worn out interior finishes, this store added to its “low-brow” ambiance with “creative” custom signage and the familiarly annoying anti-theft buggy locks. Maybe this isn’t the best part of town?
Regardless of that, I still am glad I got to witness the custom art and experiences this store got to offer. Rest assured that this was not the highlight of my expeditions of the day.
I still hope you enjoyed this adventure to some new territory as much as I did. It taught me how influential the region was for The Beef People and how the regional grocer really seemed to tailor its stores to the local clientele. I never would have expected to see so many Louisiana-specific items, much less state-themed décor pieces.
I am at least comforted by the fact that Rouses, a nice local operator in its own right, took over so many good stores in Louisiana and Mississippi. I just wish that somebody could have saved #1472 at Mid-City. Similar to #1329, that store will also be morphed into an ALDI in several months’ time.
Anyhow, if you liked this post, don’t forget to check out all of my other work, and most importantly, don’t forget to subscribe to Grocery South to get the inside scoop on all of my future content.
It has been my pleasure to bring Marketplace Madness 2026 to you, and I hope to see you back here soon!
Until then,
- Sing Oil Media
I had no idea about the Delchamps plane crash -- that's very sad. It must be dangerous to be a supermarket executive in Alabama...
While the entire Jitney/Delchamps newspaper piece was interesting to see (especially the graphic of locations and states), I was particularly intrigued by the Corky's ad, lol. I guess perhaps Corky's once had a wider reach, and could be considered a broken chain these days? I've only ever been familiar with their presence around Memphis.
It was neat seeing the local elements of this store, from the shelf/cooler graphics to even the custom SE Grocers product!