Peachtree City can expect the curtain to rise on a new Harris Teeter grocery store early next year, members of the Planning Commission learned Monday night.

Rush Dixon, vice president of design for North Carolina-based Harris Teeter, said that his company is planning a full-line operation for the site formerly used by Big Star.

Harris Teeter, which has more than a dozen stores in the metro Atlanta area, will be using its prototype plan, which is about 36,000 square feet, and adopting it for this location, which is slightly smaller.

There are no plans to expand into the Eckerd space next door, Dixon said, as it would be “problematic” to expand in that direction.

“Big boxes don't necessarily work any better,” he said. “This size fits into communities better, and fits shoppers' time.”

The Peachtree City store should be roughly the same design as stores currently under development in Toco Hills, Sandy Springs and on Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta, Dixon said.

The company is programming for a January-March opening, depending on contractors' issues.

Most Harris Teeter stores are open 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. But that is not set in stone, and Dixon said the company will convene focus groups in the area to see what the customers want.

Harris Teeter, whose slogan is “Your Neighborhood Food Market,” is a subsidiary of Ruddick Corp. and based in Matthews, N.C., a suburb of Charlotte. It operates more than 140 supermarkets in the Carolinas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia, with about 17,000 employees.

According to the company's web site, Harris Teeter had record revenues of $2.1 billion in 1998, up 10 percent from the previous year.

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