Key Foods will officially take over Wayne Memorial Drive store Tuesday
By Bonnie Edwards
Published in News on November 12, 2006 2:00 AM
The Southern Family Markets store on Wayne Memorial Drive will close at 4:30 p.m. Monday and reopen Tuesday morning as a Key Foods store.
Ed Farceur at the store confirmed Friday that the store is changing hands.
"Tuesday we'll open for good," he said.
Southern Family Markets was a Winn-Dixie in the summer of 2005, but it was one of three Winn-Dixies that closed when the corporation shut down its North Carolina stores. Southern Family Markets bought the store shortly thereafter and has operated the supermarket since.
But on Sept. 8 this year, the corporate office of Southern Family Market confirmed that the company's store on Wayne Memorial Drive was for sale. The grocery chain's headquarters in Birmingham, Ala., announced it was going to vacate the North Carolina market.
After a couple of months of negotiations, Key Foods Cooperative agreed to take over leadership in the operations at the local store Monday. Each of Key Foods' stores is individually owned.
Key Foods, based in Staten Island, N.Y., develops merchandising programs that fit each store's neighborhood. For information about what the Key Foods stores are like, see the corporation's Web site at www.keyfoods.com.