Jackson Jambalaya

"We'll open winter 2014". That represents an eleven month spread, actually. January 2014 and December 2014 are eleven months apart but are both 'winter 2014'.

Parking is already a hassle in Highland Village and adjacent shopping center areas.....duh....ya think that parking concerns might have been a topic from the beginning????

Well, that's a shame, but the key thing is that all the city's problems will soon be solved. Whether it's in 2013 or 2014 really doesn't matter all that much.

First it's fall 2013. Now it's WINTER 2014!! That sucks.How did these dipshits not notice there is no parking before they started construction? This is crazy.

Hey. Whole Foods has a policy about timing before store openings. Memphis threw timing of Jackson opening off. Deal with it haters. They are coming. They will be successful. Deal with it.

Study and call for facts. They will open in February haters. Deal with it.

District at Eastover broke ground today. Feel better, bigots? District at Eastover broke ground today. You assholes writing shit hating on Jackson....be intellectually honest and DONT EVER GO THERE.

Or Whole Foods for that matter. Cynical POS's.

8:55 I am a person who wants to shop there, not a hater. They are dipshits if they can't manage to open multiple stores simultaneously and they are further dipshits if their store ends up opening more than a year after it was supposed to. And why are we supposed to believe you that it will be February 2014? Their own spokeswoman is now saying Winter 2014!

9:38 Are you aware you're making sense, and we don't know whom you are addressing with your sentence fragment?

Would you care if you did know that?

To the 952 grammar hack. Did you understand the comment? I'm curious how smug you feel with an English degree worth 60K max feels, while I make 3 times that, net. Just curious.

Wow, what a bunch of confused people. Winter begins December 22 every year, and ends March 22. So the bulk of "winter" actually happens during the first 2-1/2 months of the following year.

So Whole Foods opening in Winter 2014 means Jan or Feb or even early March of 2014, not December of 2014!

More products of the MS school system (public or private doesn't matter)?

I'm not sure if parking is the issue, but it's the first thought I had when it was announced. Really? In the parking lot of Highland Village? Did they look at the site before deciding to go there?

I don't care if it is built in Jackson or the 'burbs. It will be heavily patronized. Those two corners of Northside Drive are congested as is. Throw in parking for employees, parking for patrons of Whole Foods and Highland Village will be at a premium. Maybe they should have borrowed the plans for a parking garage from the Old Capital Green project.

Hey little one, (that posted at 8:55 and 9:36).
Calm yourself, or bad things might happen... other than a heart attack.

You might miss deadline, and Momma Donna won't give you a "Kick ass of the week- Best of Interns award ".

So. slip off those Birkenstocks and ride that ole Vespa down to the hip, eclectic, coffee house of your choice and order a "Reunion Pineapple Frappe", and
just chill.

Everything will be OK.

$25.00 organic carrots will be here before you can say "boil water alert for Hinds County" .

Pitt, once again, as he does so often, earns the stool and dunce cap. In December of 2014, when you sit in front of a fire and its 37 outside, if I axe you, "Hey dude, is it winter, summer, spring or fall?" Whatchu gonna say?

Whole Foods will ditch Highland Village and move into the District at Eastover.

I hope the district opens very soon. The jackson thugs have ruined the madison theater for my family an myself. Maybe a theater in jackson will help keep them out. And I don't plan on going to whole foods anyway. My car has been broken into three times at highland village. Good luck with that, yuppies.

How many employees will Whole Foods have?

I'm sure there are some good west Jackson folk who would gladly offer valet service.

The tide is rushing in and the haters can't take it. LMAO!

The Madison Theatre comment is ridiculous.

Are you using a Christian calendar or lunar calendar to determine how much of I don't give a shiv about whole foods?

Love it, LOVE IT, when the Prophet admonishes readers here to be "intellectually honest".

POT-KETTLE-BEN ALLEN

This is a good one, when Paul Anthony's Market was in Highland Village, there was just enough parking. Now they are in Canton Mart. The Madison Movie theater is not full of thugs but my wife has banned me from going because of the youths who walk from movie to movie with cell phones texting the whole time. The manager of the theater will not stop them so we just plain don't go. We will drive all the way to Airport road to see a movie as that has not been a problem there.

I suspect that there will be lawsuits filed against the owner of Highland Village by other merchants. There is barely enough parking much of the time without a grocery store in the parking lot.

There will not be enough spots to go around. It's going to hurt business. They are going to claim that customer parking is one of the things they pay for with their rent, but now it's gone.

9:52 is spot on. The parking hassle will hurt all the businesses there including WF. The owners of Maywood Mart better be prepared to play hardball with anyone parking there to walk over to HV.

Noticed that Teddy's District is marketing itself as "Jackson's City Center". Neat play on words. Certainly not a claim the red ink disaster downtown can make.

How can any development in Jackson be bad? The city needs all it can get! BTW--have you been to the new shopping center in Madison recently--lots of good folk from west jackson are going now...

What I suspect happened was that when they were in the permitting process, the architect and or civil engineer did a "parking count" (which is required determined on sq ft., and handicapped requirements) that they boasted met the minimum standards. What they probably DID NOT tell the lease holders of HV was that they were actually borrowing spaces from the existing parking. The city of Jackson wanted and needed this project to happen so badly they went along with it.

C'mon people. Whole foods will not require that much parking space after the initial hoopla dies down. Probably not a lot different from Fresh Market in Ridgeland, which is rarely that busy. We're not talking about a Kroger or some other large grocer who packs in the masses. Employees will undoubtedly be required to park on the upper lot, where there is always room. And the east side of the main HV parking lot is almost vacant anytime except Christmas.

So, 10:36, the city broke its own zoning laws.How do you count a parking place twice? HV parking has been used to support the sq ft. already in place.

You are wrong 11:26. There is a huge market opportunity for overpriced lettuce.

No dog in this fight. Look forward to traveling from home in Madison to shop there. I live in an old neighborhood with small homes, so I am not loaded, just one of the many little people that live here.

Whole Foods is a very large company and can open multiple stores in multiple locations in multiple states without breaking a sweat.

Parking for the stores is in conjunction with city codes. Most companies will use the standard sq ft times customers to get a parking lot striped. Sometimes a city will have a different set of guide lines. This is all worked out in the planning, design and conversations with the city. So to say all of a sudden they don't have enough spaces would tell me most likely the city or developer screwed up.

Please 'splain how texting-while-walking teenagers affects others' enjoyment of a Madison movie. If your wife makes your social engagement decisions you have bigger problems than texters.

John Bell 'Breakdance' Crosby is consulting on this project. He has many years experience in the grocery bidness as well as important knowledge of paving and traffic control. He also designed the only two-story Taj-MaGrocery in Mississippi. And you know damned well when you get John Bell, it's a twofer and you also get.................Rudy.

11:26
The upper parking lot is only sparsely populated on Monday, when Bravo is not open. It's been obvious from the beginning that, with the addition of Whole Food, there is nowhere near enough parking in HV. The only solution now is a two or three level parking garage. Renaissance and Dogwood will profit greatly from the shoppers that find it too frustrating to fight for a space in HV. If I were a long time tenant, I'd sue too.

10:35:

BS

1:44 is right. Sorry 10:35. Those are likely ridgeland residents. They aren't quite as loud as the west jackson ones.

"Well, that's a shame, but the key thing is that all the city's problems will soon be solved. Whether it's in 2013 or 2014 really doesn't matter all that much.
September 25, 2013 at 8:53 PM"

Yes! Exactly! Let's dwell on this important Mississippi-style truth! All Jackson's problems WILL be solved, with the magical appearance of Whole Foods - an authority figure from out there in Yankeeland, like Laura Ashley, Ethan Allen, and BassPro.

Only... Whole Foods is better! It's YOUNG! It's HIP! It will attract HIPSTERS! It works just like the pretend runways and pretend airplanes constructed by the Cargo Cults in the South Pacific (to lure the giant shiny birds down from the sky, which bring canned foods). Build a Whole Foods, and tens of thousands of UPSCALE young hipsters will magically appear, doing Hipster things, and being just... well... BETTER!

Suddenly, we'll all be in BOULDER! And everybody will be pretty and happy and hip and WHITE! (but not in an evil, racist kinda way... no... white in that GOOD kinda way... We're not sure what that is, exactly, but when the Hipsters arrive, they'll show us how. Yep!). OK, there will be minorities. But they'll be young and pretty and perky - liveen lifestyle - lookin' just like the pretty, perky young brown people adorning all the glossy literature the banks and phone companies send us. That'll make us feel good about ourselves, 'cause they'll be, you know, "The Good Kind".

And there'll be lots of spendin' money, suddenly, for buyin' all that somehow-better produce up in the Whole Foods Wonderland. (I'm sure the 'Conventional' produce up in Whole Foods is better than the non-Organic produce up in the Kroger.)

Reality in Mississippi is derived from consensus. If everybody decides to believe the trucks spewing poison can't hurt you, then, by golly, the spray is HARMLESS! If everybody decides every word of the Bible is true, then it IS! If everybody decides something, that makes it true! Consensus is reality, in Mississippi.

So, let's all git together and BELIEVE. Whole Foods is a comin', an we's all gonna be in Colorado, SOON!

Let's all click our heels together and chant, "There's noplace like Whole Foods! There's noplace like Whole Foods!..." and suddenly, we'll all be transported to some lily-white college town in some mountain range out West. And we'll all be young and blond and HIP, forever...

Ben Allen, president of Downtown Jackson Partners, said at the press conference that he has seen figures showing that, with all the residential development downtown in the form of loft apartments and condos, that in 10 years there could be as many as 25,000 people living downtown, tripling traffic on Pearl Street and Pascagoula Street.

-- Mississippi Business Journal
-- March 3, 2008

C'mon people now,
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try and love one another
right now

6:25 You did realize that Whole Foods headquarters is in Texas and not Colorado, right?

Only thing more entertaining about 6:25's post than his mistaken belief that whole foods is based in Colorado (based on God knows what evidence) is the fact that he referred to the outside world as "yankeeland." Yep, with such intelligent people talking bad about Jackson, how could one not be swayed to take his side? By the way, no one has ever told you that "Yankee" actually means American, have they? Next thing you'll be telling me is that Obama is a dawg-gone Muslim from Kenya.

I'm just glad that there's plenty of parking at my Sonic and Wall Mart out here in Rankin County. Jackson doesn't even have a Golden Corral. So sad.

The influx of 25,000 people into the downtown Jackson lofts will start the "food truck" industry in Mississippi.

Hummingbirds and cool people will return
to Smith Park and be happy. No longer will the JPD dispatchers have to say the routine
"shots fired on _______" ( Insert Jackson address ) .

The "homeless mentally ill" will disappear from Fondren.

Whole foods will be Jackson's saviour.

I wonder how Mr. McDade views all of this bull shit about "no competition" ?

You DO realize 6:25 was deliberately being silly, don't you? I don't think the actual location of the Whole Foods Corporate Headquarters is really material to her parody on the fantasies of certain people.

You DO realize 6:25 was deliberately being silly, don't you?

Too many of the Whole Foods apologists are too dense to figure it out.

But they sure are looking forward to purchasing their dietary fiber there after it opens because, after all, only the best fiber is sold at Whole Foods.

Chuckie doubled the sewage rate at just the right time.

I wonder how many of the people posting negative comments about Whole Foods have ever stepped foot inside of one? I had not until a couple of years ago when I went to the one in Birmingham, AL and it was very impressive! I don't think people will stop going to Kroger and other grocery stores for their everyday needs because Whole Foods is really a specialty store. If you like to cook and often find a recipe which calls for something you could never fnd around here, the odds are pretty good that they will have it. It's a good store and will be good to have here so I really don't understand all the sarcastic, negative comments. I will definitely enjoy having it here.

It's because a lot of people thrive on their own ignorance.

Whole Foods is pretty much like the Rainbow in Fondren- times 1000. I love the Rainbow, but it is just not convenient. For those who also like the Rainbow, Whole Foods will change their lives.

Perhaps if more people would read about Whole Foods and stop bitching about parking and opening dates, they may just learn something. And when it does open, try peeling yourself away from your laptop, iPad, and iPhone and actually walk inside. It's not a trendy little chain like Fresh Market. Maybe more people will shop there instead of just sitting around griping while increasing Mississippi's obesity rate.
That's all

Glad you brought up Rainbow, Rebekah. Rainbow is a Co-op. It's a non-profit. I can trust them to sell vitamins NOT MADE IN CHINA. I trust their Olive Oil to not be diluted with Canola. I know their bulk items are from safe sources. I know their organic produce is truly organic, and not relabeled. I know their honey does not come from China. I know Rainbow is All Organic, all the time. I trust them.

On the other hand, I've been reading for over a decade, that Whole Foods is a corporation with questionable business practices. I'd rather pay the lower prices at Kroger, frankly, if I'm going to buy Big Box groceries. Any Big Box is under relentless pressure to buy the cheapest, and then pass it off as "the best".

Something tells me that Whole Foods' Stevia products are going to be like Kroger's Stevia products (all the labels I've read there hint their Stevia, Organic or 'conventional', will be adulterated with things I don't want in my body, like "Natural Flavors". "Natural Flavors" is generally code for MSG.)

Kroger has Organic produce, and 'Conventional' produce. WF has Organic and 'Conventional'. Kroger will probably be cheaper. And I can shop in their gorgeous Madison store - in a safe town. Going to WF will mean braving Jackson's drug-addled/senile/drunken/psychopathic drivers - and going into a far less fabulous building to shop. (does Highland Village still have tired garbage like Elton John and the Jackson Five blasting from the speakers in the parking lot? When they put in those speakers, they lost me as a shopper. But I guess they wanted something to drown out the screams of any women being abducted from the parking lot... I guess that smarmy music from the Dark Ages of Rock works as well as anything, if that was their goal.

I made the mistake of going into the Whole Foods in New Orleans, a few years back. They were playing Good-tyme Oldies at life-threatening volume. Everybody was singing and jiving with the tired old Vietnam Era music. Couldn't get out of that HELLHOLE fast enough. And I'll never set foot in another Whole Foods.

I don't trust their foods to be any safer than those of any other major grocery store. They are all 'style' and no substance. But of more immediate concern to me is that the locals will not understand why Rainbow is better. I fear that Rainbow will lose too much business and close.

I really don't want to have to start mail-order buying, again, from far-distant co-ops in better parts of the country.

What I like about Rainbox is that the women don't shave. I have no doubt that if we have more women like that downtown the place would be bustling.

"But I guess they wanted something to drown out the screams of any women being abducted from the parking lot... I guess that smarmy music from the Dark Ages of Rock works as well as anything, if that was their goal."

I can't follow if you're for or 'agin Whole Foods but that line is a classic.

And 8:06 - not all the women at "Rainbox" (you a Phil Lesh fan?) are female, if you get my drift and I believe you do :-)

Yes! Rainbow does a lot of mentoring, and has brought into the Work Force, quite a few people who previously had had problems with employability. They deserve huge kudos for their work with battered women, and maybe they're helping the Transgendered,too.

Over the years, I've noticed the individuals to whom you're alluding, 9:29. And, thinking back, I'm remembering that they were fast, courteous, and COMPETENT - in a city where most of the people working the checkout lines are slow, oblivious (if not overtly rude and hostile), and clueless as to how to do their jobs.

So, I'm really not seeing any negatives here, where these gender-ambiguous individuals are concerned. As for whether the 'real women' at Rainbow are shaving (or not)... I haven't noticed. Frankly, I'm too busy bagging my own groceries.

Don't know if anyone still cares, but heard through the NE JXN neighborhood grapevine that the delay in opening was caused by foundation problems already developing due to Yazoo clay. Construction issues happen. Also, since I pass by there at least once a day, those haters of you who never come to Jackson should know that the entire parking area is being re-designed.

the store is set to open around then end of January 14 for all the people crying about the date getting pushed back a little bit.

Kingfish, I wish you would start a new discussion now that Whole Foods has opened. Today, I made my first visit to Highland Village since WF opened. The parking lot is a complete cluster. I could barely get in my car to leave thanks to some idiot parking crooked in the parking space...speaking of the parking spaces, they are a cluster, but I already said that, didn't I? Those parking spaces look like they were designed for compact cars.

I cannot imagine the existing HV merchants are happy with the parking lot situation. Maybe the "new" will wear off, and maybe Saturday isn't the best day to go to HV now.

no to mention people parking across the street in Maywood and getting towed.

this is not a "surprise" though as tenants in HV brought this up from the get-go.

since WF owns HV now, it has encouraged some stores to leave, "encouraging" others to seek other locations and never really addressed the parking concerns.