Chattanooga's B&B Discount opening 2nd site

B&B Discount store manager Lisa Matthews, left, works with Katelyn Daghlian to price items before Thursday's opening at the former Food Lion on Hixson Pike.
B&B Discount store manager Lisa Matthews, left, works with Katelyn Daghlian to price items before Thursday's opening at the former Food Lion on Hixson Pike.
photo B&B Discount store manager Lisa Matthews, right, works with Donna Southerland to price items before Thursday's opening at the former Food Lion on Hixson Pike.

A Chattanooga retailer of discounted furniture, electronics and other household goods is taking his show to Hixson and opening a second location.

B&B Discount Sales owner Duane "Bud" Hixson, who has operated a site in a former Kmart location off Signal Mountain Road for the past six and a half years, has converted a closed Food Lion supermarket on Hixson Pike into his newest version of the store.

The new store near Big Ridge Road, slated to open today, will feature 29,000 square feet - about half the size of the other 60,000-square-foot store.

"I think it's a good spot," Hixson said. "I drove by there for three years thinking it was a good spot."

The Hixson Pike location will offer more of the same - discounted furniture, appliances, home improvement goods and other items.

Hixson said he obtains the merchandise from company insurance-related settlements and then resells the items, marking them down by what he said is up to half their original list prices.

"We don't pay as much and sell it 40 percent to 50 percent cheaper," he said. "Business is good."

In addition to the new store, Hixson said he has bought the former Bi-Lo shopping center at Dayton Boulevard and Browntown Road.

Rudy Walldorf of the Herman Walldorf Commercial Inc. real estate firm said the center has about 45,000-square-feet of retail space.

Walldorf said the 13.25-acre site has been largely unoccupied since 2006 when Bi-Lo built a larger store at Morrison Springs Road and Dayton Boulevard in Red Bank. The purchase price was $725,000, he said.

Hixson said his business had been leasing another former Food Lion store on Mountain Creek Road near the Kmart where he had a warehouse operation. But that shopping center was recently purchased and the new owner will repurpose the site for self-storage.

Hixson said immediate plans are to do some work to the Red Bank location and potentially add to the building.

"It's a nice, sound old building," he said. "We're going to bring activity. We'll change the appearance."

Part of the Dayton Boulevard site is home to professional wrestling, and that is expected to stay in the short term, Hixson said.

The Mountain Creek Road center will be converted into self-storage space in a nearly $6 million project that's a venture between Ziff Properties of Mt. Pleasant, S.C., and Reliant Self Storage.

Walldorf said that 5-acre tract held one of the larger Food Lion stores before it, too, was closed after the grocer nearly exited the Chattanooga area in early 2012.

Contact Mike Pare at mpare@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6318.

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