TOUR: Harris Teeter - Sea Island, Mount Pleasant, SC

Harris Teeter
Opened: 2013
Previous Tenants: Piggly Wiggly
Location: 1220 Ben Sawyer Blvd, Sea Island Shopping Center, Mount Pleasant, SC
Photographed: January 2022

Today's store tour is a very interesting one! I don't normally find Harris Teeters that exciting, but this one has an interesting backstory. It's one of five Teeters in Mount Pleasant, an affluent suburb to the east of Charleston. And until 2013, this store was a Piggly Wiggly. It seems that Piggly Wiggly, not too long before they closed, expanded the store from its original 22,000 square feet to its present 35,000, and presumably redid the interior too. Despite that, Harris Teeter extensively remodeled the interior again when they moved in, but as we see they didn't do much to the exterior.

We enter to deli-bakery in the front right corner, with produce in the back right corner. The first aisle is a liquor store, with meat and seafood on the back wall. Frozen foods and dairy are at the left side of the store.

I haven't been to too many Teeters, but this was by far the nicest I've ever seen. The decor I mentioned was attractive back at Ocean View looks really spectacular in its deluxe version here, and the fixtures have all been updated very recently.

As we see, there are some interesting islands and such breaking up the merchandising. We can see just a little bit above the bread island before we get to produce...

...which is also very attractively designed and merchandised. I love the flooring! And if we turn around and look back up towards the front of the store we find the bakery department again...

And moving on to the back wall we have cold cuts and packaged meats.

I love the wavy overhang above the wall decor! We've seen other stores that have design elements like that before, and I also really like the way it's echoed in the floor patterns.

A very beautiful liquor store takes up the first aisle. The wooden beams overhead are striking.

And once we move into the grocery aisles, there's not too much more to see. I'm not a fan of this flooring at all, but the shelving is nice.

And as we see, the store is plenty organized and clean. But for more exciting decor, we return to the back wall for the meat and seafood departments...

Again, beautiful design here and great fixtures too. Looks like the coffin case right in front of us might be on the older side, but everything else is new. And here, the exciting lighting extends throughout the whole store, not just the grand aisle!

Aisle 10 has one side of frozen foods, and aisle 11 (the last aisle) has one side of frozen and one side of dairy. Additional frozen is in the front corner, if I'm not mistaken.

I think this is a decor package that works much better on the perimeter than center-store. I don't particularly like the flooring or fixtures here, and the signage is only fine. But the wall decor is exceptional...

And dairy and frozen continue down the last aisle. I believe the layout is mostly held over from Piggly Wiggly.

As we get to the front-end, we see more beautiful decor elements with the overhang and the flooring repeated from the produce department.

I was quite pleasantly surprised about this Harris Teeter, and I'm glad I visited! (I also bought a very nice sweater and a pair of brand-new jeans at the Goodwill next door, always a good thing.) And despite the copious supermarkets to the east of Charleston, we will not be seeing any more to the east of the city sadly. Instead, we're heading south of Charleston tomorrow to check out James Island. We'll be right here on The Market Report for a couple more days, so come back to see our next stores!

Update Local expert Carlton Swift says: "This was also a Belk department store. Belk moved to a larger location in the early 2000s, and Piggly Wiggly expanded into the former Belk."