As a fresh produce specialist in the early ’90s for a market-share-leading grocer with almost 70 locations, you would think we would have had a generous budget to merchandise stores to our hearts content. Imagine: as much labor needed to reset stores, any set or combination of the latest fixtures — all just a phone call away.
If you think that was so, you’d be thinking wrong.
In fact, in most chains that we knew with this size would not only have this merchandising muscle and equipment at a moment’s notice, but it would also have additional merchandisers (aka marketing specialists). In an ideal world, this would be one produce specialist for every district, or roughly every dozen stores or so.
If you’re fortunate enough to work in such a retail utopia, that’s wonderful — as it should be.
As for the chain I worked in, there was just myself and my good friend and specialist colleague, Greg Hendricks. We routinely helped each other out, coordinating at least three to five new store openings each year, up to six remodels over the same time period (the most challenging projects) and countless overnight resets; in those resets, we teamed up and helped remerchandise a store to inject some merchandising excitement and some pizazz back into the crew — and in every reset instance, we tracked sales.
And sales in every such reset project shot up at least 10% or more every time. When properly maintained, this continued on a steady incline.
Why? In a word: possibilities. We specialists saw the possibilities, and when we tried different seasonal and merchandising techniques, the marketing bug usually caught on with the produce manager, and the phrase, “What if we try this?” became a common refrain.
That’s much better than the lament we also occasionally heard: “That’s not gonna work,” or “We already tried that.” Oh, ye of little faith.
Without that helpful budget, Greg and I were compelled to rely on our own wits, boyish charms and good old-fashioned ingenuity. Both raised in large families with limited means (and having come up as longtime produce managers with the same chain), we faced our reset challenges using all the tried-and-true methods: We used lots of pallets, shipper cartons, wire bound crates, shipper POS, dairy crates, bakery racks, duct tape and anything that was readily available, including used watermelon bins, corrugated cardboard and more that we rummaged for and usually found lurking in every dusty backroom loft.
You name it, we employed all the seen (and unseen) things found in every store to dummy up, reshape, repurpose and finally restock the department with high-quality fresh produce (the star of the show) to give things a new or different look.
To be fair, sometimes we were able to shuttle orchard bins or incline tables from one part of the company to another or actually get a purchase approved if we wanted to, say, try out some new fixture or on-floor ice table for stocking veg items out in the open.
We could typically justify spending a few hundred bucks per reset to buy things such as bushel baskets or similar props. The rest was just Greg and me, the produce crews we worked with, a little planning and a lot of hustle.
We even fashioned our own homemade misting systems from drip irrigation supplies procured from a garden center, and these were connected to an automatic timer from Grainger to boot, all for around $150 (compare with current misting systems averaging between $3,000 and $5,000). Sometimes we removed some of the fluorescent bulbs overhead, creating shadows and bringing some theatre into the fold.
Talk about knowing how to be frugal, yet productive.
Probably the best part about going into each project was the feeling that, despite the limited or low marketing budget, we still felt like we had endless possibilities to try what we could. The district managers, store managers and even company VPs all told us the same thing: “Do what you can. Try whatever you think will work. It’s OK to spend a little more labor. Just infuse some life into this place. You have our support.”
That’s what made the specialist job so rewarding: knowing that there were only limited pushbacks to explore what merchandising possibilities we could conjure up.
Fast-forward to today. When I see far more-expensive fixtures and dedicated, high-end equipment in a store, the thing that always comes to mind is: Man, today’s produce crews are spoiled; imagine what Greg and I could have done with these things.
Armand Lobato’s more than 50 years of experience in the produce business span a range of foodservice and retail positions. He has written a weekly retail column for two decades.
