Collecting The Carts

The best place to start this story is with Al Kessel. He was an icon of local television commercials in Michigan. His strategy for his commercials was basic but effective. He’d show up in the commercials, sharing his latest deals, holding the products to show them off. The ads would always show up on Wednesdays, and you would always wonder what he’d do next. Not quite Crazy Eddie, not quite Dave Thomas. He was his own thing. While no modern examples of this exist online as far as I can tell, he was famed for throwing particularly large objects, like turkeys or watermelons, sometimes leading to an audible off-camera smash. The commercials were quirky and low budget, but it worked. Kessel was an icon throughout the region for these commercials, though not a universally beloved one. See, after Kroger closed a number of stores in union battles in the early ’80s, Kessel (an executive at another grocery chain) bought the stores and reopened them as Kessel Food Stores, sans union. It led to protests , but people don’t remember those. They instead remember the cheerful guy who threw turkeys on TV. Brilliant strategy, if you think about it. When I found myself working at one of his stores, I wondered if I someday might see him. The answer was yes-after he had sold the chain to Kroger in 2000, closing the store I worked at, literally on the final day the store was open. It was the first time I remembered being starstruck, and I was starstruck by the guy who was literally kind of ruining my cozy little work life. I’m older now, and I now understand the dynamics of this story at a higher level. Intentionally or not, Kessel essentially laundered Kroger out of unionization over a two-decade period, where he ran the stores, then eventually sold most of the stores back. Cunning strategy on Kroger’s part when you lay it all out. I loved working at that store, but when it closed, I got transferred. The next one, I ended up quitting within a couple of months, because of a debate over bottle deposits. (A quick aside on that last point: Essentially, local bars would deposit all of their bottles at our grocery store, even if they didn’t actually buy anything at the store. I requested that reasonable limits be put on the bottles, rather than sticking me at a machine for two hours of a four-hour shift when someone dropped off $100 worth of glass bottles. My request, which presumably would have gone over better with a union, was refused. So I quit.) It was a nice two-year lesson in the upsides and downsides of corporate culture, and I learned it when I wasn‘t even making $6 an hour. “We’re With You” is admittedly an ironic slogan for a store that exists because of union busting, but what do I know? ( The Flint Journal/Newspapers.com ) As far as I’m concerned, Al Kessel wasn’t as cool...

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