Happy July 4th, Plus One!

Yes, my friends, it’s that time again! The day after America’s birthday comes Pleasant Family Shopping’s birthday, number 5 this year. It’s the day I go scrambling through my files for a nice summer scene and try to come up with something clever to say about it.

The scene is certainly nice enough  - a good old Piggly Wiggly, in this case a Texas location operated by Shop Rite Foods of Texas (not affiliated with the Shop-Rite of the Northeast), circa 1965. The sun is shining, the lady is well-coiffed (shoot, hair spray is even advertised on the wall!), and the store employees are courteous and nattily dressed.  The Cokes are in glass, as they should be - 6 1/2 ounce size in the thrifty 12-pack.

As far as the “clever” part goes, I’m at a loss this time around. My best idea for a post title, “Gettin’ piggy wit it”, might not make sense to some folks (something that usually doesn’t stop me), and besides, it’s already been used on a bumper sticker. Oh, well!

Thanks so much for your support. I hope to earn your continued readership.

Dave

Publix, Wonder of Winter Haven

America’s greatest business stories are the result of gigantic mergers and acquisitions. Just look at the titans of our time – AOL Time Warner, Daimler Chrysler, Suxco…an impressive group, don’t you think? These companies all were the product of grand executive vision – to create synergies, to optimize efficiencies, to be proactively active, maximizing core competencies and enhancing shareholder value while at the same time improving the drab, wretched lives of all “stakeholders” in a manner consistent with the company mission statement. Inspiring stuff, huh?

Okay, anyone who has read this site for a while has probably figured out by now that the preceding paragraph is ridiculous and doesn’t reflect my views at all, and I suspect not many of yours either. (And I know, “proactively active” doesn’t even work grammatically.) No, to me, the greatest business stories center on the companies that started from scratch – little to no capital or connections, just hard work, persistence, heart, an attitude of service, and a dream – very often the dream of one person. Eventually others are recruited to help fulfill the dream, and the result makes history. The story of Publix and its founder George Jenkins is a prime example of this.

Born in 1907 and raised in Harris, Georgia, a tiny rural community 90 miles southwest of Atlanta, George Washington Jenkins, Jr.’s family operated a small general store. At the age of 12, Jenkins began working there on and off, pushing a broom, stocking, and doing occasional counter duty. It was there that he learned the importance of quality service and keying in on a customer’s likes and dislikes, although as he later admitted, he had no designs on a retailing career at that point.

At that time, the economy of that area was almost fully dependent on a single crop, cotton. In the early 1920’s, the economy of the deep south and central Georgia in particular was utterly devastated by the boll weevil, a type of beetle that descended on the nation’s cotton growing areas like an insidious, relentless plague. By 1923, the entire area was in the midst of a deep depression, years before “The Depression” hit the country as whole. Jenkins’ father’s store, owed $ 50,000 in customer accounts he would never be able to collect, was wiped out. The elder Jenkins moved to Atlanta to start up a small grocery store - on a cash basis, of course. The rest of the family stayed behind in Harris, including George Jr., who had two years of high school left to finish.

At age 17, Jenkins moved to Atlanta, but ironically would never work in his father’s new store. Instead, he worked a series of short-term odd jobs – cab driver, lumber hauler, shoe salesman – while attending electrical engineering night classes at Georgia Tech. He then got a job that he stuck around in just a bit longer than the others, clerking at a local Atlanta Piggly Wiggly store. After a couple of months behind the counter, he began a series of fill-in assignments for area Piggly Wiggly store managers. After six months on the job, a local real estate entrepreneur talked young Jenkins into quitting his grocery job to try his hand at real estate, where he promptly sold a house at a nice profit. (It would prove to be his only sale ever.) Soon afterward, this real estate “mentor” convinced young George that their fortunes lie in Florida, where the real-estate market was allegedly reaching 1849 Gold Rush proportions. With $11 in his pocket, Jenkins made the trip, ending up in Ybor City, a predominantly Hispanic section of Tampa. His real estate-mogul dreams soon dashed along with the prospect of hanging on to his eleven dollars, Jenkins managed to locate some old friends who now lived in Tampa who gave him a place to stay. The Florida trip had become just a vacation, and he fully intended to hitch a ride back to Atlanta after a week or so.

Before that week ended, though, Jenkins would reach a turning point in his life. His Tampa friends brought him to meet a man “who just happened to own 14 Piggly Wiggly stores in the area”, as Pat Watters’ book “Fifty Years of Pleasure” puts it. Jenkins mentioned his experience working at the Atlanta Piggly Wiggly, prompting the chain owner to offer him a job, which George accepted as a means of earning enough money to resume classes at Georgia Tech the following fall. Starting at 15 bucks a week , again “as a broom pusher and a stock clerk”, Jenkins was soon promoted to manager of a St. Petersburg store at more than double the salary, plus a percentage of the store’s gross. The “Fifty Years” book cites that under Jenkins’ leadership, the store’s sales increased from $1300 to $6600 a week with a year’s time. Shortly thereafter, he was put in charge of the chain’s largest store, their $7000 a week Winter Haven unit, where he would spend the next four years.

The changing economic times ultimately had a negative effect on his store’s sales, and Jenkins saw his pay cut. In 1930, the entire group of stores was sold to an Atlanta-based operator, who “never took the time to visit the store”, as Jenkins would later mention in a 1978 speech. Frustrated with his new boss’ hands-off approach, Jenkins decided to travel to Atlanta to meet with him in person there. Arriving at the company headquarters, Jenkins was told the owner was in an important meeting, and would be unable to see him. Overhearing the boss’ conversation through the door, George soon discovered what the topic of the “important meeting” actually was – his golf game! Offended more by the owner’s negligence than by the personal slight, Jenkins resolved then and there to go into business for himself. The incident provided a huge lesson for Jenkins, one that would profoundly influence the philosophies behind the company he would soon start up.

Resigning from Piggly Wiggly upon his return to Winter Haven, Jenkins took $1300 he had been saving for a new car and used it to open his own grocery store – right next door to the Winter Haven Piggly Wiggly. His former employer had asked him to stay on one more week to train the new store manager, and George agreed. During that final week, he took every opportunity to tell his loyal customers about his plans for the “store next door”, inviting them to come check it out after he opened up. Most of them did, and before long, due to the loyalty of those customers and several months of Jenkins’ aggressive pricing approach, "the Piggly next door wiggled no more”. (Poetry fail.)

Jenkins borrowed the name for his new store from the Publix theatre circuit, a then huge chain of movie houses controlled by Paramount Pictures (the company was actually called Paramount-Publix Corporation for a brief time in the early thirties) that included such legendary theatres as the Paramount Theatre (Times Square, NY), the Brooklyn Paramount, the Chicago-based Balaban and Katz circuit, and a host of other theatres in towns large and small across the entire country. In 1935, the company became one of the more spectacular casualties of the depression, a big reason why we associate the name “Publix” with supermarkets instead of theatres today.

In 1935, five years after opening the first Publix, Jenkins opened a small second store in Winter Haven and incorporated his business as Publix Food Stores Corporation. In the years immediately following, he operated those two stores and also began to travel a bit to investigate a new food retailing concept – the supermarket. Delighted with the concept itself - huge volume, self service, etc. – but turned off by the barren, shabby appearance of most of the early supermarkets (most of which were former factories or warehouse buildings), Jenkins began to devise plans for a new kind of store - a full-line supermarket with an unprecedented level of shopping comfort and eye appeal, that he termed “America’s Finest Food Store”.

Based on everything I’ve read about supermarkets of that era, I think it’s safe to say that if it wasn’t “the finest”, you could probably count its equals on one hand and still have some fingers left. With $25,000 in proceeds from mortgaging some orange groves he owned, Jenkins opened his new showplace in Winter Haven in 1940. The new Publix was a marvel to behold, with an art deco/streamline moderne exterior design finished with white stucco and black marble, a masonry and glass-block tower and huge plate-glass windows. The “Fifty Years” book cites another first, “something never seen in Florida for a grocery store –a parking lot.” Inside were wide, uncluttered aisles and “high-style decor”, as Chain Store Age would later refer to it. The most exciting features of the new store, in the mind of the public, were the electric-eye doors, rare anywhere in the United States at that time and absolutely unheard of in small-town central Florida before then. Jenkins himself considered the store’s air conditioning system to be an even more important feature, second only to the supermarket concept itself. The new Publix became a veritable tourist attraction. Soon after its opening, Jenkins sold off the two older stores.

Both the “Fifty Years of Pleasure” book and the text of the above-mentioned 1978 speech relate a moving story about Jenkins, sitting on the steps of the First Baptist Church, directly across the street from his new store on the eve of its opening: “I looked across the street at that beautiful store and said to myself ‘There will never be another one as pretty as that. This is the finest food store that can be built’”. Something tells me that he was also thinking into the future, beyond that one store, even though he wouldn’t be able to open another one for nearly five years and Publix was the furthest thing from ‘a chain’ at that time. I’ll take that over “synergies” any day.

The pictures, showing the 1940 Winter Haven Publix, are from the Florida Photographic Collection.

Winn-Dixie's Family Tree

The roots of Winn-Dixie’s “family tree” can be traced back to two small grocery stores in 1920’s Florida. The first of these was a wholesale grocery unit in northeast Florida, purchased by E.L. Winn and W.R. Lovett in 1920. From that humble start, Winn and Lovett built a chain of “small neighborhood-type” stores, reaching a total of 65 units by the end of 1928. On Christmas Eve of that year, the company was officially incorporated as Winn & Lovett Grocery Company. The company prospered through the depression that followed, and in the early 30’s embarked on a program to consolidate its small stores into fewer but larger units that would feature self-service, an emerging trend in the grocery industry. By the end of 1934, there were 55 stores located in central and northeast Florida and in south Georgia, under the Lovett’s and Piggly Wiggly names. By this time, W.R. Lovett had bought out Mr. Winn’s interest in the company.

The second of these two “founding stores” was opened in 1925 in Lemon City, a suburb of Miami by William M. Davis. Davis had operated a general store in Idaho in the years prior to World War I, and had recently relocated his family to Florida. Known initially as “Rockmoor Grocery, Inc.”, the company that eventually resulted was called Economy Wholesale Grocery Company. From 1927 on, the stores themselves went by the name of Table Supply. By 1934, there were 34 Table Supply stores in south and central Florida. The company had moved into the Tampa area three years prior with its purchase of the Lively Stores chain. That same year, the elder Davis passed away, and control of the company passed to his four sons – Artemus Darius (A.D.), James Elsworth (J.E.), M. Austin and Tine W. - “The Davis Brothers” would become a fairly well-known group in Wall Street circles in decades to come.

In November 1939, W.R. Lovett sold his interest in Winn & Lovett (a chain that had by now grown to 73 stores) to the Davis Brothers. Lovett stayed on in an advisory role as chairman, and A.D. Davis took over as president. For a five-year period, and despite the same ownership, the Winn & Lovett and Economy/Table Supply firms were run as separate companies. Davis’ three brothers, J.E, Austin and Tine continued to run the family’s original business during this time. On November 25, 1944, the two companies were combined into one entity under the Winn & Lovett corporate name. There were 118 total stores, half of which the company described as “supermarkets”. The retail stores themselves continued to operate under their existing names – Table Supply, Lovett’s and Piggly Wiggly. There were also a handful of Economy Wholesale Grocery stores.

(It’s interesting to note some of the major grocery chains that once operated Piggly Wiggly-bannered stores in addition to their traditional nameplates. Besides the Winn & Lovett-owned “Pigglys”, Kroger operated a number of them in Atlanta, and H.E. Butt (H.E.B.) had many in Texas in those years.)

Over the following decade, Winn & Lovett grew rapidly through acquisition, adding a number of new chains and territories. In July 1945, the company took a major step outside of its traditional Florida/south Georgia market area with the purchase of Louisville-based Steiden Stores, Inc., a 31-store chain. In late 1949, the Margaret Ann grocery chain, with 46 stores conveniently located within the company’s core Tampa and Miami areas, was acquired.

In 1952, Winn & Lovett achieved the special distinction of being the first Florida-based company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Of lesser note but still important was the company’s growing stable of private labels, with the purchase of the former B. Fischer manufacturing plant in New York, makers of Astor coffee, tea and spices, a longtime Winn & Lovett supplier. The company already had bread bakeries in Jacksonville and Miami and a salad dressing/mayonnaise/peanut butter plant in southern Alabama. In April 1955, Winn & Lovett purchased the Carr-Consolidated Biscuit Company, makers of Crackin’ Good cookies and crackers. Unfortunately, Carr’s Chicago plant burned down a mere four months later. A replacement Crackin’ Good plant was opened much closer to home in Valdosta, Georgia in 1958.

The company rapidly moved into adjoining markets, including Albany, Valdosta and Savannah, Georgia and Dothan, Alabama in 1953. The following year, Montgomery, Selma and Anniston, Alabama and Columbus, Georgia were added as well.

And of course there were more store chain acquisitions, including the Kwik Chek Supermarkets of the Tampa and Miami areas. I have to admit that this one puzzles me, as a number of web sources mention Kwik Chek as a company acquired sometime in the early/mid 50’s. The first mention of it in a Winn & Lovett annual report came in 1953, when the name Kwik Chek appears alongside the other familiar banners – Lovett’s, Margaret Ann, Table Supply, etc., but no merger or acquisition is mentioned in that or any subsequent editions. A search in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal historical archives, usually excellent sources for “fact-cheking” (sorry) the dates of even small corporate acquisitions, yielded nothing.

Kwik Chek is significant in that it provided the company an enduring brand icon, the famous “Chek mark”. In the late fifties, the company would phase out all but the “Winn-Dixie” and “Kwik Chek” banners, with the Chek mark prominently featured (encircled) in the center of both names. When they further narrowed it down to simply “Winn-Dixie” in the 1970’s, the Chek mark still reigned as the company’s logo, as it does to this day.

In mid-1955, Winn & Lovett bought out Columbia, South Carolina based Edens Food Stores, Inc., with 33 stores in the central and western portions of the state. The “Dixie” portion of Winn-Dixie came later that year when the company purchased Dixie-Home Stores, a 117-store chain based in Greenville, South Carolina, giving the company nearly 400 stores at the close of 1955. Still more acquisitions were just around the corner. On November 15, the company’s name was officially changed to Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc.

The next ten years would be "crackin’ good" for Winn-Dixie, by all measures.

The photos above are shown in a reverse chronology (more or less) of the store nameplates that would come to make up Winn-Dixie. The Dixie-Home photo (with its Food Fair-esque pylon) is from Chain Store Age, the Kwik Chek photos are shown courtesy of the Tampa-Hillsborough County Library System and the rest are vintage Winn & Lovett publicity photos. Below, from the Florida Photographic Collection, is an interior scene from the Davis family’s first Miami grocery store, circa 1925.