Specialty grocer Trader Joe’s will open its Chattanooga store on Aug. 25, and the developer who pursued the company for more than a decade says he believes the unit “will be one of the better ones.”
“It will draw people from other cities, Cleveland, Dalton and other cities around,” said Chattanooga developer Bassam Issa.
The store at 2111 Gunbarrel Road, sitting at the corner of one of the main entrances into Hamilton Place mall, will open at 9 a.m. following a ribbon-cutting ceremony, according to the grocer.
The 11,000-square-foot store will feature artwork that pays tribute to area landmarks, including the Chattanooga Choo Choo, the Walnut Street Bridge, and the Tennessee Riverwalk, the company said.
Issa said he bought the property where the store is situated about two years ago believing it is “a special location.”
He said he’d been thinking of bringing a Trader Joe’s to Chattanooga for 10 to 15 years because people in the city had been asking for one.
“It wasn’t time when I asked [the company earlier],” he said.
With the Gunbarrel Road site at the mall entrance, Issa said he reached out again to the company.
“It was great timing,” he said. “They saw the location.”
The former building on the site, which had held AAA Chattanooga for many years, wasn’t big enough nor situated correctly on the parcel, Issa said.
“We didn’t think about a remodel. It was the best thing to build,” he said about the new structure that has gone up.
Issa said CBL Properties, which owns the mall and the adjacent shopping center, has been “generous in accommodating any request by Trader Joe’s to me to make it happen.”
“I’ve been blessed to have it work out successfully,” he said.
When Trader Joe’s opens, it will become the third specialty grocer within a two-mile strip of Gunbarrel.
The Fresh Market at 2288 Gunbarrel Road is located at The Overlook at Hamilton Place near Best Buy. Meanwhile, Whole Foods opened a second Chattanooga store at 1814 Gunbarrel Road at Gunbarrel Pointe late last year, moving into the site of the former Earth Fare store after that grocer filed for bankruptcy.
Chattanoogan Chuck Pruett, who operates Pruett’s Market on Signal Mountain and opened the Greenlife Grocery specialty grocer in 1999 in North Chattanooga before selling it to Whole Foods, said there’s room for all three stores on Gunbarrel.,
“They fill a different niche,” he said.
Trader Joe’s has “an incredibly strong” private label program, Pruett said.
Gina Acosta, executive editor of Progressive Grocer and Retail Leader, said the opening of Trader Joe’s will be a regional draw and attract shoppers from as far away as Alabama and North Carolina.
“Because this is the first Trader Joe’s in southern Tennessee, I would expect the opening to attract people from all over the area, including from north Georgia, north Alabama and even southern North Carolina,” she said.
Trader Joe’s already has stores in Knoxville, Nashville, and Germantown, outside Memphis, in Tennessee.
According to the grocer, daily operating hours in Chattanooga will be 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Alcohol sales hours will be 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday.
Contact Mike Pare at mpare@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6318.