Retailer of the Year/Food Industry Hall of Fame

challenge. Hiring the right people today and keeping the right people.

How do you address that problem?

Number one, we have to have better hiring practices, which we are working on. Not just hire a warm body. But that’s a challenge for everybody, I think.

And then we have to train them. We have to make sure we don’t just hire a courtesy clerk and say, “go bag groceries.” We’ve got to train people better and hopefully we can slow down some of that turnover. That would be a big plus for us and, I think, for everybody in the industry.

This continues to be one of those rare industries where you can actually get a good paying job with little education as long as you are willing to work hard.

And treat people right.

Wages are 50 percent of our costs with benefits. Now, when we have to pay $240 million more this year in wages than we paid a year ago, that’s not easy to say that helps you, but it probably does over the long term.

What did you learn during your years away from Albertsons (Fred Meyer, Rite Aid, etc.) that you brought back to Albertsons? In other words, was there anything that you changed at Albertsons as a result of the things that you learned elsewhere?

I would say that certainly as I had other jobs I picked up things that I’ve used in my career.

I ran Rite Aid for a while, and it was 100 percent centralized. Everything that was done in a store was dictated by the corporate office. I saw that system, which I didn’t like very much. In a drugstore environment you probably stuck to that because it’s got limited SKUs and it’s all automated replenish.

At Fred Meyer, I learned about variety; if you had everything that a customer wants in your store, they are going to be more likely to shop with you for everything. And that goes with the grocery store. I tell our guys when I go to a store—and I go to a lot of stores—if you don’t have fresh chicken livers, then you are going to lose a customer. Now that means you might have to throw three or four packs away a week, but when they buy that chicken liver, they will probably buy a whole basket of other things. So I learned that having variety and being in stock on things people wanted was one of the big keys in the grocery business.

I also learned that you could spend a lot of money on IT and systems. I learned that at Fred Meyer in my first CEO job.

Tell me about Albertsons’ growth over the last few years.