BATON ROUGE - Monday morning it was back to business for Devon Harris, one of the owners of Capitol Grocery.

Harris has been busy prepping his store for the Spanish Town parade, but he's also been dealing with private business matters that quickly became public last week. Rumors have been swirling about a potential closure of the century-old store after a fallout between the new owners turned ugly.

Harris wants to clear the air and put the speculation to rest.

“I promised the people of this community that this would be a full-service grocery store and not anything else. That’s exactly what this is going to be and I’m not going to let anybody else come in here and turn it into that," Harris said. 

Harris says a disagreement between himself and a new consultant about the direction of the store's future got blown out of proportion.

“She wanted the store to go in a direction that I wasn’t prepared for it to go in, or that the neighbors wanted the store to go in," Harris said.

A pink sign posted in front of the store by the Historic Preservation Committee added fuel to the fire, but Harris says it's just for renovations to be approved. He's looking to add a new roof, replace some boards and repaint the building.

As Harris gets a new week started, he hopes to put all of the confusion to rest so he can get back to running his business. 

“That’s all I am trying to do. Trying to do the right thing by everybody and everything.” 

Harris is the only person who runs the shop, so customers may notice a bit of irregularity with operating hours for the time being.