The history of The Kroger Company can be traced back to 1883, when Bernard Kroger opened the first chain store in the United States, the Great Western Tea Company.
Through unremitting efforts, Kroger developed his company from mainly operating small grocery stores to operating supermarkets. He played an important role in the history of American business development, and many American business regulations were formulated based on the development of Kroger Company.
Today, Kroger has more than 2,000 large supermarkets in the United States, employs approximately 170,000 people, and has annual sales of approximately US$19.1 billion.
In 1873, a financial panic broke out in the United States. This storm put many small and medium-sized companies, including Kroger's father's small grocery store, on the verge of bankruptcy, and also pushed Kroger, who was only 13 years old, into the business world.
In order to maintain his family's livelihood, Kroger was forced to drop out of school and work everywhere. Later he started a small business selling coffee along the street.
Kroger people are sweet-mouthed and willing to endure hardships, and they soon have a group of regular customers. By the age of 20, Kroger had saved enough money to buy a grocery store.
Kroger, who has been hawking in the wind and rain for many years, cherishes this small grocery store that can shelter from the wind and rain. He always thinks about his customers and provides attentive service, making "customers feel like they are here as soon as they walk in the door." Became a hereditary noble." Kroger also cut prices to attract customers, setting sales prices just above cost. In his own words: "The meat close to the bone is the most fragrant, and customers come to you for the smell."
By the summer of 1885, the 24-year-old Kroger established the Great Western Tea Company and owned Four stores. When the financial panic broke out again in 1893, Kroger seized the opportunity to acquire a large number of stores on the verge of bankruptcy at low prices, bringing the company's number of stores to 17. By 1902, Kroger had 40 stores and a food processing plant in Cincinnati and changed the company's name to The Kroger Grocery and Bread Company.
An important reason why Kroger has been able to grow rapidly is that the company deals directly with customers, eliminating many links that require the intervention of middlemen, reducing costs and thereby lowering prices. Kroger once had a famous saying on commodity prices: "The further you go on the road to lowering prices, the better, so that your competitors can't reach your throat."
In order to reduce the middleman link , Kroger built a bread baking room and became the first store in the United States to produce and sell its own bread. Not only are these breads cheap, they're fresh. Standing outside the counter, customers can see the entire process of bakers baking bread, which enhances their trust in the food.
The success of the bakery greatly inspired Kroger. In 1904, Kroger purchased the Nagel Livestock Meat Sales and Processing Company and became the first company in the United States to sell livestock meat in a grocery store. company.
However, this time the reform was not as smooth as last time. At that time, it was popular among American butchers to short-change their customers and take back pieces of meat home. All this is incompatible with Kroger's "service first" and "cost reduction" approach. Therefore, Kroger installed automatic cash registers at the meat counters, so that weighing and payment are all done by machines. But before long, these tellers often broke down for no apparent reason, and the sale of livestock meat was still controlled by the butchers. Kroger instead hired female saleswomen to do the weighing and checkout. The butchers used obscene words and actions to force the saleswoman away. When Kroger hired male salespeople, the butchers threatened them with force.
But Kroger took an uncompromising approach to the butchers' approach. He dismissed those stubborn butchers one after another and published recruitment advertisements in newspapers:
“Butchers who are willing to work for Kroger Grocery and Bread Company, please carefully apply before applying. Think about whether you can be loyal to your customers." Kroger's fierce defense of its business philosophy finally prevailed, not only turning around the butcher culture in its stores, but also greatly improving the company's credibility.
In 1912, Kroger expanded its business beyond Cincinnati for the first time, buying 25 stores at a time in St. Louis, Missouri. In turn, Kroger began looking to build a chain of stores across the country.
By 1920, Kroger Grocery and Bread Company had established a huge chain store network in Hamilton, Columbus, Ohio, Detroit, Indianapolis, Indiana, Springfield, Toledo and other places. These chain stores are unifiedly organized by the head office to purchase goods. Due to the large quantity of goods purchased, the company can get much more discounts from wholesalers than independent stores, thus reducing costs.
By 1928, Kroger Grocery and Bread Company had become a leader in the American retail industry and a veritable retail empire. Kroger, the founder of the kingdom, sold his shares in the company for $28 million that year, and William Albers succeeded him as president. At this time, the company has 5,575 chain stores under its name.
As soon as chain stores appeared, many criticisms followed. Many people accuse chain store companies of using unfair competition to eliminate small and medium-sized independent stores. Moreover, these large chain stores also monopolize commodity prices, destroying the spirit of free competition and forcing consumers to accept high prices.
By the end of the 1920s, the anti-chain store movement reached its climax. Politicians, radio hosts, newspapers, etc. all have the same tune: "Chain stores are dangerous." On the one hand, people are worried that chain stores with strong development momentum will quickly dominate the retail industry, thus monopolizing commodity prices and increasing consumers' shopping expenditures; On the one hand, they are worried that the strong power of chain stores will affect other industries. Because these chain stores deal in products that are closely related to people's daily lives, they are indispensable. Rising prices for these commodities will inevitably lead to rising wages and costs in other industrial sectors, thus affecting the entire U.S. industrial system. In addition, one of the biggest complaints from consumers is that many chain stores sell low-quality goods, especially food. These chain stores buy low-quality goods at low prices and then sell them at high prices.
Kroger Grocery & Bread Co. became the target of this anti-chain store movement. Albert Morrill, the company's new president in 1930, had to deal with not only the Great Depression but also public dissatisfaction with the chain.
In order to eliminate customers' concerns about the company's food, Morrill specially organized special buses to take customers to the company's farms and factories so that they can see with their own eyes how Kroger Grocery and Bread Company selects and processes high-quality raw materials. Producing food. In the end, the company simply established a Wesco Food Company that was open to the outside world, responsible for supplying food to various chain stores under the company's name, and strictly controlled the quality of the products from the purchase point of view.
Morrill also established the Kroger Food Foundation and became the first company in the United States to hire experts to conduct scientific testing of food. The foundation also established a Housewife Advisory Committee, and hired 750 housewives to taste food samples donated by the company at home and put forward suggestions for improvement.
As he set out to restore customers' trust in the quality of the company's goods, Morrill also worked to improve the company's image as a price monopoly. He divided the company's business into 23 branches, each headed by a manager. The manager can set his own price standards based on actual local conditions, and the head office will no longer set unified prices.
This decentralization policy has greatly mobilized the enthusiasm of various branches. In 1930, Michael Cullen, a manager of the company's southern branch, proposed a revolutionary idea: to build large self-service shopping malls and abandon the traditional salesperson service method. This can not only reduce the number of salespersons and sales costs, but also increase customers' shopping freedom and attract more customers. In fact, this is the concept of "super mall". Karen opened the first supermarket in the United States in New Jersey, setting off a wave of retail revolution.
Increasing customer trust in the company's products and building superstores were two of Kroger's trump cards in surviving the Great Recession and the anti-chain store movement. By 1935, the company had 50 superstores.
After World War II, Joseph Hall became president of Kroger Grocery and Bread Company. This man known for his innovation opened a new page in the history of the company.
Hall renamed the company Kroger and introduced 45 company exclusive trademarks at once to deepen customers' impression of the company's products.
The customer survey activity is a major reform measure personally presided over by Hall.
Hall insisted: "It is the customers who have the most say in what products the company develops, what services it adds, and what sales methods it uses. To this end, he installed customer "ballot boxes" next to all cash registers. Customers can Put your opinions and suggestions on Kroger into the box, such as which products are needed, how to improve which products, what special services are needed, etc. Leave the customer's name and contact address on each "ticket". , once the customer's suggestion is adopted, he can enjoy the service or purchase the product in Kroger's store for free for life. He can also receive a discount card from the company and enjoy discounts when purchasing any product.
The "ballot box" is very popular with customers, and there is an endless stream of people making suggestions. Kroger will tailor every new measure and product to the company based on their suggestions. The newly launched products were an instant hit. The company's business coverage expanded to Texas, Minnesota and California, and sales exceeded the $1 billion mark in 1952.
In 1960, Kroger Co. Based on customer suggestions, a drug counter was added to the store, which was a great success. In 1962, a discount store was opened based on customer suggestions. The decoration of this store was extremely simple and the services were minimal. Customers felt like they were entering a store full of goods. Because the operating and management expenses were reduced, the prices of goods here were extremely cheap, which firmly attracted the working class with huge purchasing power. By 1863, Kroger's annual sales reached 2 billion. US dollars.
New Development
James Herring became president of Kroger in 1970. He not only emphasized the construction of super stores with a full range of varieties, but also focused on the establishment of more concentrated varieties. Specialty stores attract customers with special products.
Herring called the customer "ballot box" set up by the company a "scientific market research method". He asked the company's employees to "satisfy the requirements of a lover." "To meet customer requirements. Kroger's planning, advertising, and innovation are all based on customer wishes. For example, Kroger was the first to indicate expiration dates on the packaging of perishable goods and launch pollution-free products." "Green Food", adding nutrients that are easily lost during flour refining to Fuqiang Flour Food, etc.
Herring not only valued customers' suggestions, but also encouraged employees to contribute ideas. In 1972, a company employee He suggested that the checkout counters in various supermarkets were too slow and the cashiers read the prices from the product labels and entered them into the cash register. Often customers had to wait several minutes to check out. The company uses an electric eye system in railway transportation. This system uses an electronic sensor (electric eye) to read specific signs on the carriage, such as tonnage, type, origin and destination, etc. In this way, when a train passes through the electric eye at high speed, everything about the train is recorded. The data was quickly transferred to the computer, and various train information could be displayed on the terminal immediately.
This proposal attracted great attention from the company, and it immediately joined forces with the famous RCA company in the American electronics industry. In order to solve the problem, that year, we developed the first electronic scanning machine in the United States for payment collection in supermarkets. As long as the scanner is used to scan the label of the product, the price and product name of the product are automatically entered into the computer, and the total price is immediately calculated, greatly shortening the customer's waiting time.
After entering the 1980s, Kroger shifted its development direction to "one-stop" super-large supermarkets. The business varieties of this kind of shopping mall have reached an all-encompassing level. They not only engage in retail, but also operate beauty salons, financial services, fast food restaurants, gas stations, etc., so that customers only need to park once to purchase all the goods and get what they need. Various services.
Throughout the history of Kroger, the company has always put innovation first.
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the company’s founding, The Kroger Company once published a large promotional book called "100 Years of Innovation - The Kroger Story". The book states: "100 Years of Innovation It's just a moment in history, so the deeds of Kroger can be summarized in just one sentence: 'I have what others don't have, and I have something new when others have'."
This corporate brand is in the World Brand Laboratory. Ranked 200th in the 2006 "Top 500 World Brands" compiled by World Brand Lab. The company ranked 80th in the 2007 Fortune ranking of the world's 500 largest companies.