Retailer of the Year/Food Industry Hall of Fame

that we own 49 percent of in Texas that’s growing. We are excited about our Lucky banner in Salt Lake that’s a low-priced operation that’s doing really great, and we are going to roll out more of those. So we are not just sticking to conventional stores.

El Rancho is being managed and run by the same people?

Same people.

And that’s what you do with most of your acquisitions; you leave them alone for the most part and they run their own businesses.

Yes, like United (Family of Stores) that we bought— we’ve never put somebody from outside United into that company to help them in four, five years almost. Now, we have taken a couple of people out of there to go somewhere else, but Robert Taylor was the CEO when we bought it and he’s the president now and he runs that division. We’ve actually given him our West Texas and eastern New Mexico stores, so his company was 50 stores, and it’s 130 or so now.

Has that been one of your favorite acquisitions?

It’s been a great one. But there have been a lot of good acquisitions. We bought seven stores in Idaho, Paul’s Markets. We closed two and the other five are hitting the ball out of the park after we remodeled them. We buy a lot of little ones and twos and threes, and a lot of people, a company our size, wouldn’t get excited about those things. We get very excited about them.

Is there anybody that’s coming into the picture now that you are concerned about?

Well, we talked about home delivery, and you know if that becomes 10 percent of the business, we’d better get our share of that or that would hurt.

You are already investing in that.

Yes…I’m not too worried. I mean, we are doing the right things there.

I think there are other things that worry me more, and one is technology. We are spending lots of money on artificial intelligence. We have seven major projects we are working on, checkout being one of the big ones. What’s the new way to check people out? You are talking about the Amazon Go store–you know it’s got 1,200 items. It’s not going affect many people. It’s going to hurt convenience stores and restaurants. It’s got lots of bells and whistles, it’s fun to talk about, and they’ve got the money to spend on bells and whistles anytime and anywhere they want.

But we want something in our front end that is…we usually don’t want to be ahead of the curve. We want to watch what other people do and then react quickly if it’s working. Here, we are spending lots of money looking at different things in the front end, including things that are not in the U.S. because we have to figure out how to check the customers out more efficiently and faster.

On the other hand, one of our real strengths is a lot of the checkers we have in our stores have been with us a long time. When you visit a lot of stores what you see sometimes is four or five checkstands open and a long line in one of them. And you know right away that that’s somebody who has worked for us a long time and people love. In fact, we have a store in Boise that was featured in the local news here where one of our checkers, a guy, he’s so friendly that people can’t wait to come in and say hi to him in the morning. We gave him a special award for being such a great employee.

TODD BRODERICK

Denver Division President

I first met Bob following the merger of Albertsons and Safeway. I had always heard that Bob was a “people person” as well as a champion of our employees. Bob proves this true whenever we visit stores together or interact with employees in our office, regardless of position. It’s not only the personal interaction and conversations Bob has with our employees but more important, it’s how he makes them feel about the value of what they do and the role they have in our success.