When Donald Rouse was a boy, every weekend and every day after school, he worked at the grocery store owned by his father. “I basically grew up there,” he told me, in his soft Houma accent. His father, Anthony, and uncle, Ciro DiMarco, opened the very first Rouses location in Houma in 1960 — 65 years ago this year. “It was our first store, a little small one, 7,000 square feet, and I just remember being with my dad, listening to him, serving customers.” (For comparison, today, a newly built Rouses might be 50,000 or even 60,000 square feet.)
It made for an interesting and in some ways exciting childhood. He bagged groceries. He carried bags to customers’ cars. He mopped floors at the end of the day, and bagged chicken that came in on ice and potatoes that came by the sack. “I was kind of like the neighborhood kid, but in a grocery store,” Donald recalled. “Just being able to be on the floor at the store all the time, and mingling with the customers, really getting to know them and our team members. They all knew me, and I knew all of them. I enjoyed that very much.”
His father used to take him to other grocery stores near and far, to see how Rouses could somehow improve. “Any time we traveled along the Gulf Coast, we would visit Bruno’s, Schwegmann’s, Winn-Dixie — all of them,” said Donald. He and his father would walk up and down the aisles and talk about what they were seeing. “Look, some places like Bruno’s in Alabama were really good at what they did,” he said. “I was young, walking around the store, looking around with my dad, thinking to myself, ‘This is the kind of store I want to operate one day.’”
Those experiences shaped Donald, and gave him a vision for what he wanted Rouses to be if he ever had a chance to run it — which he did, beginning in the 1980s. “I wanted Rouses to be known as one of the best grocery stores in the country, and to be mentioned with the likes of H-E-B and Publix and Wegmans,” he said. “To me, if you’re known like that — known for being a great operator — that means you’re really delivering a great experience to your customers, and that’s really what it’s all about.” He devoted his career to that goal and, today, feels proud of where Rouses stands in the grocery industry and in local communities.
Donald was the second-generation CEO of the company. He retired from that role in 2016, but remains chairman. Today, his son, Donny, is the head of Rouses Markets. “I’m so fortunate that I have an opportunity to see Ali and the entire third generation working so hard, and to see them accomplish more than me — to actually do better than what my brother Tommy and I did.” Things in the grocery business have changed dramatically over the years, and Rouses now has 66 stores in three states along the Gulf Coast. “To see them operating at a higher level and accomplishing more than what I did — it’s just so overwhelming, and something I’m very proud of.”
Donald speaks with his son at least once a day. He remains interested in operations and is happy to offer advice when it’s needed. “My dad did that for me and my brother, but just like my father was with us, I try to stay out of day-to-day operations. That’s for Donny to handle, and he’s very capable. He’s been running things for quite a few years now.” Donald feels the same way about Ali Rouse Royster, another third-generation owner of the company, as well as the other members of the Rouse family keeping the stores going and their teammates. “I’m fully interested in results, and in the big projects that they want to pursue. They’ll get my opinion,” he said with a laugh.
As chairman, however, Donald is concerned chiefly with customer service. “I enjoy doing this and have since I started as a boy. I love the business and I love serving people. I get very disappointed when I disappoint someone, and my team knows that, my family knows that,” he said. Similarly, it bothers him whenever he learns that a store has let down a customer. “Customers don’t realize, I think, how much their business means to me and how much it disappoints me if, or when, we disappoint them.” When you have a million customers a week coming through your store, you’re bound to disappoint somebody, he admitted, but he’ll still obsess over that one. “When someone is disappointed in Rouses, it becomes my top priority. I want to know what happened, why, and what we did to rectify it. I guess that’s part of enjoying the business: having that deep interest in each and every customer and each and every team member.”
While he’s not in the stores every day like he used to be, he still reads every email sent by store guests. “I expect the good things; that’s what we’re supposed to do. I don’t ever want an unhappy customer,” he says. So if a customer ever has a question or concern, he’s quick to let the team know.
Though we all visit grocery stores a couple of times a week, they still remain somewhat mysterious. Every Rouses location is a complex logistical operation with many moving parts. Stores face constant new challenges that come about as technologies and communities evolve. The changes since Donald worked at that lone Rouses location in Houma have been astounding. In the old days, you did everything by hand, from labeling prices on products to tracking store inventory. The only way to know the prices of competitors — to make sure Rouses was more competitive than anyone else in the market — was to physically go to all the other stores in the area and compare pricing. Today, however, Rouses Markets is able to process complex analytics to keep tabs on what customers want, and when, or where on shelves they want them. All the data now available means better prices and better service for Rouses customers.
“The way that we go to market is not by making what I used to call a gut decision,” Donald told me. “We don’t make gut decisions anymore. We make our decisions based on facts, and it’s made all the difference for our customers.” From the beginning, the Rouses mission was and still is “…to operate clean stores at competitive prices, taking care of our communities we’re serving, taking care of our team members that help us get where we are, and never forgetting where we came from.”
Being local, he explained, is everything, and “community” is the company’s North Star. “Back in my time running a store, I remember that local farmers would come to me with produce,” he said. “I remember getting to know them so well. They would come in and make their deal, okra or green beans or corn, maybe local meats or seafood — and we’d buy and sell for them. And I just remember that for some of them, that was probably their income. Knowing that we’re contributing to better the community is big to me. Very big.”
Contributing to the community hasn’t changed, but the way it looks has, in some ways. It’s not just buying local seafood and other products. Donald has watched Donny pioneer new ways to help local startups get on their feet and build their brands to get them ready for Rouses store shelves. It’s a lot harder than you might think. “You can have a great product — and a lot of people do — and they deserve to be on the shelf. But having a great product is just the beginning. There are so many steps along the way, from design to production and branding, that you have to go through. Rouses works really hard to help walk young, local companies through each step. Seeing these local startups thrive is pretty amazing. I mean, it’s really cool.”
Being part of the local community means big things and small, and Rouses is always looking for new ways to give back. “I’m always interested in being part of the communities that we serve,” he said. “We always have been. It’s just such an important part of what we stand for as a company.” He was recently at a ballgame with his grandson and, while watching from the stands, he realized that all the players were wearing shirts with “Rouses Markets” printed on them. “Rouses supplied their shirts!” he said. “Those little things, they’re everywhere. I was looking at the TV the other day, and I saw on the news a story about local food banks. And I see Rouses products on the shelves at the food bank. I was so proud.” In the bad times, he said, Rouses contributes to the community in other ways. “We are last to close before hurricanes hit, and first to open when they leave. We are always there for the community with trucks of ice and trucks of water, and giving it all away — that’s a good feeling.”
More than a few big national chains have noticed the success of Rouses Markets and what it means to the communities it serves. “There have been numerous times in the past that companies have come along and wanted to buy Rouses,” said Donald. “Of course, I always reject their offers. We’re not interested in selling — we’re interested in growing.” One time, someone from a particularly large national chain approached him and asked him point-blank if he wanted to sell Rouses. “I said, ‘No — but how about you? Do you want to sell?’ I guess I was feeling cocky, but they weren’t happy about that!”
Being a local company is the competitive edge that Rouses has over such big companies. “We can be quick to respond to our national competition. We can turn on a dime, where it takes them months to get a decision from some corporate office. We can make a decision today to change whatever we want to change in our business. We don’t have to ask anyone. We don’t have to ask the bank. We just make a decision ourselves. And that is a big, big opportunity that [larger] chains don’t have. And we never want to lose that,” he said. He’s watched as chains have come along and grown, what they did and how they responded to changes. Giant companies have tried their hardest to take over local markets, but Rouses is stronger than it’s ever been, even after 65 years. “And look,” he said, “I’ve seen them come and go. We competed with A&P, with National, with Delchamps, with Piggly Wiggly, with numerous ones that are no longer here today.”
Donald sees a future where his grandsons and granddaughters will be running the business, along with other family members. He envisions Rouses having a hundred stores in the not-too-distant future, and he hopes that his descendants running the business are never satisfied. “I mean, never,” he said. “Not everyone understands that. Every day, we should operate like we’ve just opened our very first store for the very first time, and we have no customers,” he said. “You have to work every day — hard — to gain customers. You can’t depend that they’ll come tomorrow, so you have to work hard to earn their trust and loyalty. And you do the same thing the next day, and the next day: work hard to gain those customers, gain their business, and most importantly, you must appreciate their business.”
Rouses Markets will always be successful, Donald said, as long as it does what’s best for the customers. “When you do what’s best for the customers, that means you’re doing what’s best for the business as well.” The same goes for Rouses team members: Do what’s best for them, because you can’t do it alone. He’s also very proud that Rouses hasn’t forgotten about the older stores it runs, nor the customers who’ve been there from the beginning. “We’re building stores across the Gulf Coast now, but we’re also replacing and remodeling our older stores. We can’t forget our mission, and we can’t forget our roots: where we started, and who we are.”
Back when Rouses was a single store, maybe two, his father, Anthony, would marvel at their success. “Boy, if my dad could see what we’ve got going on now, the operation that we have!” he declared. Donald’s grandfather, J.P. Rouse, was an Italian immigrant who scraped together enough money to start a little business in Thibodaux called City Produce Company. They bought things like shallots and cabbages and potatoes from local farmers, and packed them in his old truck. He sold some products at the French Market, and eventually got large enough to get into the shipping business, packing produce on railcars and shipping goods to other parts of the country. It’s where Anthony and Ciro learned the trade before founding Rouses.
“If only my dad could see the work Donny and his cousin’s are doing, and how far we’ve come as a company,” said Donald. “He would be so proud to see the business doing so well, and continuing our mission. It’s my greatest joy to be able to be here, and see the third generation be more successful than Tommy and I were in our time in the day-to-day operations. To watch them find these amazing opportunities to get better, and to watch them perform: It just makes me very proud.”
