Longtime associates reflect on past, present and future - Part 1: The Foundations Employee Pride - ShopKo Stores - Brief Article

DSN Retailing Today, Oct, 2002

So much has changed in the past 40 years at ShopKo, but at its core the company and its culture have remained very much the same. Even as the upper echelons of management turned over, there are still many who can remember back, if not to the very beginning in 1962, then pretty darn close.

When Janice Stipe joined ShopKo in 1967, the company had just a few stores and had yet to venture outside its home state of Wisconsin. Looking at ShopKo today, with its 141 stores (and 224 under the Pamida name), an outside observer might be tempted to think of the company as small. And relative to certain national chains with thousands of stores from coast to coast, they might be correct. But for people like Stipe, who started working 35 years ago at the second location ShopKo ever opened, 141 stores is a tremendous achievement.

"The growth of the company has been outstanding," she said. "ShopKo has mushroomed clear across the Midwest and the West. When we first opened, there weren't any other discount stores," remembers Darlene Simoens, buyer support manager and ShopKo employee since 1972.

"There have been some very exciting times from a growth standpoint," said Jerry Kern, director of corporate pharmacy, merchandising and marketing. Kern began his career at ShopKo 30 years ago as a pharmacist and can attest to the company's commitment to health-related categories--families of business that remain vital to the very health of the company.

But ShopKo today is a much different operation in many ways. When Stipe came to work at store No. 2, nearly every department in the store was leased. "One by one, ShopKo took over the departments and now has them all except shoes," she said, which is leased and operated by Payless Shoes.

The company is now centralized, whereas until nearly a decade ago, individual stores were responsible for their own ordering and inventory.

And for anyone with tenure, technology has played a major role in the changes experienced by employees. Simoens can remember pricing everything by hand and manually counting sales tickets returned to the general office to track sales. Not only were there no computers, but carbon paper was still the norm. "There were five or six departments," she said. "Now there are 170."

"Back then we hardly knew what our inventory or sales were," recalls Larry Vick, divisional vp of hard lines. "Now we get updated numbers daily."

"We have more research from our vendor partners and we can leverage that information to make better decisions," he said. "In the old days, we had to take calculated risks."

But technology has hardly eliminated the risks involved with being a retailer today and ShopKo's long-term employees have weathered more than one rough spot. "Survival is a big thing around here," said Vick. "But we know we're tough, that's what gets us through all this."

And through it all, ShopKo has remained, at its core, a pleasant place to work that treats its employees fairly and fosters a feeling of family on the job. That's the chorus coming from ShopKo's longtime employees, a great many of whom have remained with the retailer throughout nearly all of its existence.

And this isn't just lip service. ShopKo enjoys some of the lowest employee turnover in the retail industry and it's a point of pride for a company that attributes so much of its success and longevity to its people.

ShopKo's commitment to Green Bay has helped inspire much of this loyalty, as people are happy to have a stable employer so they are able to remain in their local community to raise their families. But even as ShopKo has helped the area by providing jobs, it also has helped the community through philanthropy, sponsorships and even by bringing in new residents as the company has grown.

For Steven Hubers, area manager of the distribution center in DePere, Wis,, that community feeling really hit home when his son was diagnosed with leukemia nearly 15 years ago. Like a true family, Hubers' ShopKo co-workers pulled together and raised money to help cover his son's medical bills. Today, the story comes full circle--not only is Hubers' son a healthy 18-year-old high school graduate who is attending technical college, he even works part-time at a ShopKo store.

While other employees may not have been touched so directly as Hubers, the sentiment of family definitely resonates throughout the company. "All good companies have great people," said Kern. "Without that, you fail."