AC Repair in Daniel Island, SC

CHARLESTON — After nearly a year of off-island grocery runs, Daniel Island residents are finally getting their only full-service grocery store back — now twice the size with a pharmacy and a covered patio seating area.

The grocery store opened Dec. 3 bright and early at 7 a.m. following a ribbon-cutting.

The new 50,472-square-foot supermarket at Daniel Island Town Center at 162 Seven Farms Drive has about 70 percent more shelf space than the 27,000-square-foot store it replaced.

The original supermarket opened in 2002.

In the new store, aisles are wider, departments are expanded and shelves are stocked to capacity.

“This is not just a rebuild, it's a complete transformation,” said Kim Reynolds, community relations manager for the Florida-based chain, during a preview on Dec. 2. “A heartfelt thank you to our customers and our community for your patience and understanding throughout this process.”

The construction lasted nearly a year, leaving island residents without a grocery store for most of 2025.

George Renton, president of the Daniel Island Exchange Club, said many residents have been shopping at the Publix at Point Hope Commons on Clements Ferry Road, about seven miles away. The island’s other retailers helped fill the grocery gap, though, such as meat and grab-and-go-provisions from the upstate-based NY Butcher Shoppe.

The original Publix closed last Christmas Eve and was demolished soon after, although replacement plans have been in the works since 2017. The store held to its anticipated fourth-quarter 2025 timeline for reopening.

Customers will recognize many familiar faces at the new store, as the grocery store chain has brought back nearly half of its previous staff which were dispersed throughout other Lowcountry stores during the rebuild.

The Daniel Island Publix has 140 employees and held several job fairs before re-opening.

Opening day will be all hands on deck with support staff to help make shopping seamless.

“We have a lot of support team here for the opening, even people from North Carolina helping,” said store manager Christy Pfuntner.

More than two decades ago, Publix secured an exclusive agreement with the developer of Daniel Island, guaranteeing it would be the only supermarket within the master-planned community, which is now nearly built out.

The grocer purchased the 5-acre Daniel Island Town Center a decade ago for $13.8 million, according to public land records. It also owns an adjacent 1.2-acre parcel on Island Park Drive.

Charleston City Council member Mike Seekings, whose district includes Daniel Island, said the size and stature of the new Publix reflects the success of the community first annexed into the city in the early 1990s.

“I've been around long enough to remember when Daniel Island was just a sandbar and (buildings) were just coming out of the ground,” Seekings said. “To predict that you’d have a facility like this on Daniel Island 10 or 15 years ago, I never would have imagined that. This is a testament to how Daniel Island has succeeded.”

Publix’s roots trace back to 1930, when founder George W. Jenkins opened the first store in Winter Haven, Fla.

Since then, the chain has grown into one of the 10 largest-volume supermarket operators in the country — and the largest employee-owned company in the United States — with 1,423 store locations and more than 260,000 workers.

DANIEL ISLAND — A bright, white shooting star blazed across the dark night sky this week in a video captured by a local resident who started his quest with the intent of spying on furry-tailed rodents.

Charlie Truesdale purchased an outdoor camera to record squirrels nesting under the solar panel on his roof. The camera didn’t do a good job catching the critters in the act, he said. He had the camera aimed at the roof, but at some point it was knocked over, pointing at the sky instead.

“Maybe the evil squirrels did it, I don’t know,” Truesdale told The Post and Courier.

The camera was in this position for about a month. He left it there because its night vision captured the constellations better than his eyes, he said. He made a few time lapse videos of the stars rotating around the Earth.

On Nov. 17, he got a phone notification that the camera detected activity. He said that was surprising, considering the camera was aimed at the sky.

He pulled up the video, taken at 3:30 a.m., to find he captured a large meteor streaking across the Lowcountry sky.

“It was originally put there to spy on squirrels,” he said. “It ended up spying on the sky.”

The night he caught the meteor on video was the peak of the annual Leonid meteors. This major meteor shower is known for Earth-grazer meteors and fireballs that persist longer than an average meteor streak, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

(Clicking on any video link constitutes consent to collection and sharing of your personal video viewing data with various Post and Courier partners.)

Though the show is now past its peak, stargazers can still spot the Leonid meteors through early December.

For the best chance to view the shooting stars, NASA offers these tips:

The Leonid shower is not the only celestial event viewable in the Charleston area. The Taurid meteor shower is active now, with the Southern Taurids visible through Nov. 20 and the Northern Taurids (which peaked Nov. 11-12) visible to Dec. 10.

The American Meteor Society predicts the Geminid meteor shower will offer a unique chance to view colorful meteors, depending on the types of minerals and materials that make them up, The Post and Courier previously reported. The cosmic event is likely visible from Dec. 4-24 with the peak predicted Dec. 13-14.