Retailer of the Year/Food Industry Hall of Fame

Ewing: Miller Makes Leadership Look Effortless

Justin Ewing, EVP of corporate development and real estate, joined Albertsons in 2006 after Cerberus Capital Management, where Ewing was employed, bought 655 Albertsons stores.

Ewing, who is British, is married to an American; that’s how he got to New York and the job at Cerberus.

Justin Ewing

At Albertsons, he took a job in corporate development and began to learn about real estate.

Bob Miller, he says simply, is a good leader.

“If you want to see what the culture of this firm is, it’s in the corner office,” Ewing says. “You know what you’re trying to achieve because he’s always straightforward and basic and easy to understand. He’s very supportive, but you always know exactly what he wants.”

A good CEO, Ewing adds, “is such a fundamental benefit to a company, and I think that’s clearly what (Cerberus) did when they hired Bob. It was a classic example of somebody who just transformed the company or made the company what it is. Yet you see so many examples of executives where that’s not the case because it’s really tough to do that. The industry is littered with people who have had massive salaries and great credentials and just failed to lead the company. So finding that person who is genuinely a fantastic leader is key.”

And Miller manages to make it look easy, Ewing says.

“It’s very, very difficult to lead and to do it effortlessly, but Bob is equally at home telling you that your counter is stacked incorrectly as he is doing a multi-billion-dollar merger. That range—boy, is it stunning.

“There’s a charm there that’s difficult to mimic,” he adds. “I really can’t think of a single person I’ve met who didn’t like Bob. Like and respect.” business. They opened these 80,000-s.f. stores in the mid-’80s and our profits went down to 20 percent of what we had. He would come in and yell at me and ask what I was doing. I said, “I’m not letting them take my business.” And we’d get into a big debate about why you need to spend so much to do that. (The competitor) ended up closing their stores after three years.

So you were able to hang in there.

Well, I almost got fired. I tell you it was interesting. When I got promoted to EVP, I had no idea it was coming. It was right after Warren and I had a big argument about something. I thought, well, I’m never getting promoted.

Did you like the high/low concept or were you more inclined to think that you needed to be low price?

In Texas and Florida when I was running it, we were the lowest priced operator there, and we had these big stores. The only big stores in the company were Texas and Florida, and they were 55,000 s.f. or so. This was in the mid-’80s. We also had lots of non-foods in them.

I really got aggressive on price when I was overseeing that division because we wanted to run traffic. The non-foods made up a lot of the profits, so we were very successful down there. A big share of the company’s profit came from those two divisions.

What about your pricing structure today?

We are priced different by banner, but our goal is to run a store that has the best quality produce—we only buy good sizes, the best produce. Even if we are running an ad, we don’t buy lower grade, which is different than a lot of our competitors.

We only sell choice meat or better. We always try to have the best quality.

In the grocery aisles, we try to have lots of variety—ethnic, organics, specialty—which all cost money.

We want to have service meat and a fish case in every store. We want to have a cake case where we actually have a decorator in the store that does all the work and has the ability to fix specialty cakes for customers.

Congratulations Bob Miller on your outstanding career! From your friends at

So, we do a lot of things in our store. We want to be clean, well-stocked, have good service, which is always a challenge in today’s world. But we want to run a high-quality store. We want to give people a reason to shop with us instead of Walmart, and we think we do that. So we are never going to be the lowest priced because we push hard to run good stores.

Let me grab on to that one comment about service and how difficult it is in these days.

It’s hard to hire good people… and then they leave. We have 285,000 employees approximately. Almost 50,000 of them have been with us over 20 years. So, we have a real core of people, but then you have a lot of people, especially toward the front end and the service, like service deli, that turn over a lot for whatever reason. They don’t like the job, they only want to work for a short time, they weren’t friendly to our customers, we had to move them on. So that’s the real