Posted on 07/26/2014 9:51:59 AM PDT by SamAdams76
A New England supermarket chain embroiled in a labor dispute provides a boon for its competitors—or does it?
One week after a company-wide employee dispute slammed the breaks on food deliveries, the shelves are looking pretty barren inside most of New England’s 70 or so Market Basket stores. Rather than shuffle past picket lines to contend with empty meat cases and dwindling produce bins, many of the region’s customers have been taking their business elsewhere.
Exactly how many customers have been going elsewhere is a question that’s begging to be answered, though of some of the area’s competing grocers are remaining rather tight-lipped on the matter.
Judi Palmer, spokeswoman for Stop & Shop’s New England division, declined to share specifics as to how the Market Basket situation was affecting the chain.
She noted, however, that Market Basket is “a main competitor” with a good portion of Stop & Shop stores scattered around Massachusetts. The chain no longer has stores in New Hampshire or Maine, but the Quincy, Mass.-based chain has more than 380 stores in New England. “Right now, we’re so just focusing on giving all our customers a great shopping experience,” Palmer said this week.
Jessica Stevens, spokeswoman for Target TGT , likewise declined to comment on the Market Basket strife or whether an increase in demand led to stocking shortages in the region. There are nearly 40 Target locations in Massachusetts and nine in New Hampshire, according to the company website. The chain carries a variety of perishable and nonperishable grocery items.
Officials from other competing grocery chains, including Hannaford Supermarkets and Wal-Mart WMT , did not respond to calls or emails sent this week.
But Jeffrey Gulko, spokesman for Shaw’s Supermarkets, said the past week has been a busy one for staff working in the company’s Massachusetts and New Hampshire locations.
“We’ve definitely seen an uptick in our sales, as well as the number of customers coming into those stores,” Gulko said on Friday. Company officials said the “most noticeable jump in sales” was this past Monday and Tuesday.
Shaw’s Supermarkets employs 18,500 workers around New England. The company has two distribution centers: one in Maine and one in Massachusetts.
“The sheer number of shipments being made to stores in those areas have definitely increased last week,” Gulko said, noting that the company has been successful in refilling shelves to meet consumer demands.
The national implications of the Market Basket upheaval remain uncertain.
“So far we haven’t heard much from any of the (competing) retailers in that area,” Laura Strange, spokeswoman for the Virginia-based National Grocers Association said on Friday.
In late June Market Basket’s board of directors set off an unanticipated chain reaction when they terminated beloved CEO Arthur T. Demoulas, replacing him with Co-CEOs: former Knowledge Universe CEO Felicia Thornton and former Radio Shack CEO James Gooch. Market Basket employees demonstrated their outrage this week by ceasing store deliveries, encouraging store boycotts and rallying en masse in shopping plazas.
The company has over 40 stores in Massachusetts, nearly 30 in New Hampshire and one in Maine. About 25,000 workers are employed with Market Basket.
On July 23, Demoulas made an offer to buy out his rivalling family members for an undisclosed sum in an effort to gain control of the company again.
“We care deeply about Market Basket and all our associates and we want to work together to return the company to its successful model for serving our loyal customers,” Demoulas said in a written statement issued the following day.
The company’s board was scheduled to meet Friday, though there’s no word yet as to whether or not Demoulas’ offer would be accepted. Meanwhile, upwards of 10,000 workers, many of them boarding buses from their respective Market Basket stores, attended a massive rally in Tewksbury, Mass. on Friday morning, backing up traffic for miles.
According to The Griffin Report of Food Marketing, the company is valued at $3.5 billion. Market Basket’s company revenues reportedly exceeded $4.6 billion last year.
alright, I’ll put him in my < 100 folder.
Hire the best CEO, even if its Arthur T, if the workers who aren’t working agree to not to be paid for the time they didn’t work. Plus Arthur T can pay for all the perishables that were wasted.
We have WINCO markets in the NW. Wiki:"WinCo Foods is based in Boise, Idaho. It was founded in 1967 and most of the company ownership is held by current and former employees through an employee stock ownership plan."
This system works wonderfully. Their prices are very low, the employees are extraordinarily helpful and cheerful, and everyone listens to the customer. You want organic? A month later, they have an organic section. People in other cities are clamoring for Winco to expand to their areas.
Sooooo, I'm wondering whether the 49.5% owner was headed in this direction. It would be to the advantage of everyone but the 50.5% family -- and perhaps to their advantage too, if customer satisfaction drove up their stores' market share.
Some of the language on this blog site is non PC, but the history is there and the part 2 is easily found if interested.
http://gloucesterclam.com/2014/07/21/clamsplainer-market-baskets-storied-history-of-crazy/
From what I heard on that Financial Exchange show this morning, they're paid better (I forget the amounts), in addition to the quarterly bonuses and profit-sharing. Lots of their employees have been with them 25, 30, 40 years; their policy is to promote from within. A District Manager called in to Kuhner's show -- he had started a bagger 25 years ago.
Arthur T. visits the stores regularly, gets to know the employees. Sorry I forget the details, but I heard of one employee whose daughter was in the hospital and seriously ill (or injured) and the insurance company was giving them a hard time about some treatment. Arthur T., hearing the story from the employee, said, "If the insurance won't cover it, I will."
One has to wonder why a company would go public anymore. Keep it in the family might be a good idea if they still care about the company.
A big question for me is how MB manages to keep the sociopathic types out of their payroll who trash employee loyalty in retail situations.
Maybe they have very talented hiring directors.
The other was with Albertson's (also a grocery chain). I forget her name, but she was instrumental in Albertson's history of (pointless?) M&As, closing stores, acquiring other chains (the Wikipedia account sounds like Musical Chairs!). An MB employee who called in said the employees understand the two new co-CEOs to be prototypical "vulture capitalists."
What's to stop the former CEO now fired from starting his own chain? New Englanders tend to be very practical and knowledgeable about things like this. If he and the employees start a new chain, customers will flock to them and Market Basket won't survive.
This thing doesn't pass the smell test. What they did is the kind of thing corporations do when they want to boost the bottom line to sell the company. Best they be left with nothing worth selling.
Thank you!
Second part for those who don’t feel like fishing around
Run down 6 or 7 pages to get to it. A movie SHOULD be made of this.
2/3 of my environment is like that, but lately the other 1/3 ‘let’s compete to see who can do the least work and try to get full-timers fired’ demoralize the hard workers because they’re EOE gold (muslim, felon, welfare case who start at minimum wage). If only the hard workers could peel off and do something like MB.
“...slammed the breaks on food deliveries...”.
Geez... Fortune Magazine doesn’t know the difference between “breaks” and “brakes”?
I stopped reading there... loss of confidence.
Well, that surely explains why the two sides of the family hate each other.
I have no idea.
Read the GloucesterClam for the whole story. There really IS JFK and a stripper involved.
http://gloucesterclam.com/2014/07/22/clamsplainer-market-basket-is-freakin-out/#comments
Reading the Unionistas trying to persuade the capitalists (unionistsas getting destroyed in the process) is enlightening, too.
Who edits this stuff, anyway?
Breaks are what employees take. Brakes are what slow things down.
Seems like we see a lot of these kinds of misteaks* these days.
* this was intentional
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