 | | |  | (Continued)
The
proof is in the stores every day. The smiles you receive from Wegmans employees are not the vacuous, rehearsed grins you get at big-box retailers. They are educated smiles, with vast stores of knowledge behind them, cultivated perhaps through company-sponsored trips to Napa Valley's Trinchero winery. After all, what good is it to offer 500 types of specialty cheeses if you can't explain the origin of each, what type of cracker to serve them on, even what wines they should be paired with? "If we don't show our customers what to do with our products, they won't buy them," says Danny Wegman. "It's our knowledge that can help the customer. So the first pump we have to prime is our own people."
Priming
the pump starts early. More than half of Wegmans store managers began work there as teens. "When you're a 16-year-old kid, the last thing you want to do is wear a geeky shirt and work for a supermarket," says Edward McLaughlin, director of Cornell's Food Industry Management Program. But at Wegmans, "it's a badge of honor. You are not a geeky cashier. You are part of the social fabric."
A
cashier making $5.93 an hour part of the social fabric? But it's true. Wegmans employees don't work in any old supermarket. They work at Wegmans, and there's cachet attached to that. You're a culinary whiz, an ambassador of fine cuisine—even if you only stock shelves at night. "Just about everybody in the store has some genuine interest in food," says Jeff Burris, who runs the wine shop at Wegmans' Dulles, Va., store. In fact, Wegmans has been known to reject perfectly capable job candidates who lack a passion for it.
Not
all Wegmans cashiers are food connoisseurs, but a common denominator of passionate customer service sets Wegmans workers apart from those at other retailers. Simply put, no customer is allowed to leave unhappy. To ensure that, employees are encouraged to do just about anything, on the spot, without consulting a higher-up. One day it could mean sending a chef to a customer's home to clear up a botched food order. It could also mean cooking a family's Thanksgiving turkey, right in the store, because the one Mom bought was too big for her oven. Is that expensive? Sure. Is it worth it? You bet. A Gallup survey found that over a one-month period, shoppers who were emotionally connected to a supermarket spent 46% more than shoppers who were satisfied but lacked an emotional bond with the store.
Empowering
employees goes beyond making house calls, though—it also means creating an environment where they can shine, unburdened by hierarchies. Kelly Schoeneck, a store manager, recalls the time a few years back when her supervisor asked her to analyze a competitor's shopper-loyalty program. She assumed her boss would take credit for her work. But no: Schoeneck wound up presenting her findings directly to Robert Wegman.
That
ethos exists at all rungs of the corporate ladder. For example, the Pittsford store sells "chocolate meatball cookies" made from a recipe passed down to Wegmans bakery employee Maria Benjamin from her Italian ancestors. About 15 years ago, Benjamin, who had been baking the cookies for other employees, persuaded Danny Wegman to sell them. How? She just asked him. "They let me do whatever comes into my head, which is kind of scary sometimes," says amiable part-time meat department worker Bill Gamer. Says operations chief Jack DePeters, only half-jokingly: "We're a $3 billion company run by 16-year-old cashiers."
Wegmans
can save some serious coin by encouraging employees to step up to the plate. When the company opened a new, $100 million distribution center in Pennsylvania last June to serve its newer Mid-Atlantic stores, it needed truck drivers. Rather than hire experienced (and expensive) pros, Wegmans allowed current store employees to apply for the job. Twenty-one weeks later Wegmans had two dozen drivers with commercial licenses; they had previously been cashiers and produce clerks.
The
Wegmans culture flows from the top: from Robert, Danny, and his two daughters, SVP of merchandising Colleen (33 and the likely heir) and 30-year-old group manager Nicole. But there is no shortage of folks to act as cultural conduits for new hires as the chain expands beyond its Rochester roots. (The company's expansion is slow and methodical: It generally opens only two new stores a year. In 2005, one is opening in Fairfax, Va., and one in Hunt Valley, Md.) The new stores may be tougher for the family to keep tabs on. But the Wegmans culture "is bigger than Danny in the same way that Wal-Mart's became bigger than Sam [Walton]," says Bain & Co.'s Rigby.
Wegmans
guarantees that by populating new stores with the best and brightest from existing ones, a strategy that wouldn't work if the company were pursuing a more aggressive rollout plan. Take the Dulles store, which opened last February (it drew 15,500 shoppers on its first day, more than most supermarkets get in a week). All its managers came from different Wegmans locations—and that doesn't include the dozens of employees from other stores who jetted in temporarily to get the place up and running. Wegmans spent $5 million on training alone in Dulles. The company never opens a store until its employees are fully prepared. The Dulles store could easily have opened in November 2003 for the critical holiday-sales season, but Wegmans chose to wait until the following February. How many retailers would do that?
The
emphasis on development over dollars attracts people who never thought they would work in retail, much less in a grocery store. Consider Heather Pawlowski, 38, an electrical engineering major at Cornell who began her career at National Semiconductor. "I was a techie," she recalls. But she had always enjoyed walking the aisles of retailers and wondering why people bought different brands. And in Rochester, what better aisles are there to walk than Wegmans'? So as a newly minted MBA, she entered Wegmans' store manager training program. While her classmates were off to Wall Street, she wore long underwear and got up to her elbows in fish guts. As she moved from packing fish to cutting meat to baking bread, learning all aspects of store operations, Pawlowski was amazed by how much time the store manager spent with her, talking about how things worked at Wegmans.
When
asked what makes Wegmans tick, Pawlowski, now a vice president, replies, "We're taking customers to a place they have not been before." And once they arrive, shoppers often don't want to leave. Longtime customer Toni Gartner, 61, is spending the winter in Florida for the first time. But all things being equal, she'd rather be back in frigid Buffalo. "I am trying to get used to Publix," she says. "I understand that Publix is rated highly. Maybe—but it ain't Wegmans."
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