CEO Using Personal Touch to Calm Troubled Robinson’s

When business acquaintances and friends talk about Robert L. Mettler, the phrase they use most is “people person.”

Given that he has just taken the helm at troubled J. W. Robinson Co.--a department store chain traumatized in recent months by losses, a change in ownership and management upheaval--that’s not a bad quality to put at the top of the attributes list.

“It’s unsettling to have three CEOs in a year and a change of corporate ownership,” Mettler said in an interview last week, his first since taking over as president and chief executive Feb. 2. “Golly, that’s a lifetime of change for most people, and all within a year. That’s tough.”

And the turmoil is not over yet. Late last week, just as nerves at corporate headquarters were becoming somewhat less jangled after weeks of defections, firings and layoffs, the chain’s new parent company announced that other cost-cutting changes are afoot.

David C. Farrell, chairman and chief executive of May Department Stores, based in St. Louis, said in an interview with Dow Jones News Service that Robinson’s will cut advertising expenses and eliminate its restaurant operations. The news caught Robinson’s executives by surprise.

“We are looking at our need to be in the restaurant business,” said Mettler, who otherwise declined to discuss Robinson’s strategy.

Of more immediate concern to Mettler, 47, is quickly getting to know as many of the 9,000 or so Robinson’s employees as possible. For the last few weeks, he has been holding daily breakfast and lunch meetings, attending sales training sessions and getting out to the chain’s 24 stores (including a new Palm Desert store opening officially this week to replace the Palm Springs store that was recently closed).

“My intention is that I will be within the next 40 days in each one of the 24 stores and will hold meetings in each to try to get to meet as many of our sales associates as possible,” he said at his office in Robinson’s corporate headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. “There are a lot of things that CEOs and divisional merchandise managers and general merchandise managers do, but the most important thing we can’t do is ring the cash register.

“There are a lot of people out there who are the face of the company.”

Get-acquainted sessions aside, Mettler must also cope with a variety of other problems--notably out-of-control costs and inventory snafus.

“The main problem at Robinson’s has

been lack of inventory and cost controls,” said Monroe Greenstein, an analyst with the Bear, Stearns brokerage in New York. “That’s what he’ll have to deal with.”

As far as that goes, Mettler foresees rapid improvements once May Department Stores, which acquired Robinson’s late last year, finishes installing electronic systems designed to streamline merchandise distribution, delivery and other operations.

Mettler’s interest in the selling floor reflects his own experience. A native of New Haven, Conn., and the son of a supermarket owner, he got his start in retailing “by accident”--taking a summer job in 1962 at a Jordan Marsh department store in Boston before he was to start a graduate school program in business and law.

The job evolved into a buyer’s post in cosmetics and then a full-time career, as Mettler worked his way up the merchandising ladder. “I call it a 25-year sabbatical from graduate school,” Mettler joked.

Associates attribute Mettler’s rise to hard work and a personable nature. He frequently rises at 4 a.m. and gets to the office by a little after 5.

Leonard A. Lauder, president and chief executive of the Estee Lauder cosmetics company, credits Mettler and Bill Condaxis, then his boss at Jordan Marsh, with developing the Lauder business at that store in the 1960s.

“We had been doing no business at Jordan Marsh at all; they encouraged us when no one had before,” Lauder said. “It became one of the biggest (cosmetics) departments in the country.”

Condaxis, now a divisional merchandise manager for the Mervyn’s chain, recalls that Mettler had an aggressive style. “We used to start at 6 in the morning and go as long as it was needed,” he said. “He’ll get things done there (at Robinson’s) very quickly.”

(Of his early-to-work habits, Mettler said: “I think it’s bad. I certainly don’t want to send signals to the organization. (But) I’ve worked this way my whole life.”)

For the first 24 years of his career, Mettler had one parent company--Allied Stores. In 1981, after 18 years with the company’s Jordan Marsh unit in Boston, Mettler became president of its Joske’s division in San Antonio. When that was consolidated with the Houston division in 1985, Mettler was made president and chief executive, with headquarters in Dallas.

Mettler’s associates say Allied planned to tap him for a key corporate spot last year, shortly before the company became a takeover target of Campeau Corp., a Canadian real estate developer. About that time, Mettler was approached by May’s Farrell to take the head job at the company’s L. S. Ayres division in Indianapolis. Like Robinson’s, Ayres was acquired when May bought Associated Dry Goods last October.

Things happened fast. Mettler had scarcely unpacked his bags during one month at Ayres when he was “totally surprised” by Farrell’s decision to move him to Southern California, which is the home turf of Mettler’s wife, Susan Trippet, formerly of Fullerton.

“I never thought of myself as a corporate gypsy, especially after working 18 years in one city. To make three moves in the space of six to seven years,” Mettler said, “that’s quite a switch for us.”