The lights are off. The electronic reader board is dead. The parking lot is empty. Greenfresh Market is closed.

But only temporarily, says Fred Coutts, CEO of the Rainier Avenue North grocery store that specializes in natural and organic food.

As the sandwich board outside the grocery store reads: “TEMPORARILY CLOSED. SEE YOU SOON.”

The store closed after its power went off Dec. 4. Coutts said that outage caused a “trickle-down effect” that spoiled much of the store’s food.

Coutts said it wasn’t a storm that caused the store’s power outage. But he wouldn’t name the outage’s cause.

“Our inventory was kind of low anyway from the Boeing strike and the economy and everything, so we just decided that we would stay closed for a little while until we put the proper amount of inventory in there and open it to be good as it was before,” Coutts said.

He hopes to reopen Greenfresh sometime this week or next. In the meantime, he and other Greenfresh leaders are establishing a long-term plan for the store, which opened in April 2007.

“We don’t plan on opening until we have the store 100 percent the way we want it,” Coutts said. “We don’t want anybody to be disappointed in their Greenfresh shopping experience.”

Coutts says the store has a “very loyal following.” But, he adds, “We could sure stand for it to be quite a bit bigger.”

Greenfresh Market

Greenfresh Market is expected to reopen in the next few weeks. The store is at 575 Rainier Ave. N.

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