In Supermarkets’ Executive Department, a Lack of Variety
Few car company executives have broken into the auto industry by working on the assembly line, and not many of today’s leading financiers launched their careers as bank tellers. But in the folksy supermarket business, the big bosses often got started as teenagers with jobs at their neighborhood grocery stores and worked their way up from there.
That fact of food business life has produced generations of supermarket executives and upper-level managers who know how their chains operate from top to bottom. But the tradition also has an underside: The people getting the biggest promotions mostly are white men. Women and minorities, despite changes in the industry recently, remain scarce at or near the top.
The lack of diversity, while perhaps not much different than in many other industries, is especially perplexing in the up-through-the-ranks supermarket business.
Women, after all, do most of the nation’s grocery shopping. And in an era when retailers are trying ever harder to find underserved niches in the marketplace, minorities are key targets.
What’s more, supermarket executive and upper-management jobs usually don’t require the MBAs or other prestigious degrees that are important for career advancement elsewhere. In theory, supermarkets--much like the military--should offer opportunity for men and women from disadvantaged backgrounds who are willing to work hard and endure the long hours that the industry demands.
And, in fact, it has worked just that way for white men such as Jack H. Brown, the down-to-earth chief executive of Stater Bros. Although he holds only a community college degree, Brown runs a chain of 112 stores that dominates the Inland Empire market.
Brown, now 59, got a job bagging groceries at the age of 13 to help support himself and his widowed mother. Aside from a two-year stint in the Navy, he has been in the business ever since.
“My story is unique in some ways but not so unique in others,” said Brown, whose rise from humble origins inspired a group in Washington to give him one of its “Horatio Alger” awards seven years ago.
Yet for women and minorities, “there’s a paradox,” said Marc Bendick, a labor economist in Washington who has served as an expert witness for both plaintiffs and employers in discrimination lawsuits.
“You would think that a promotion-from-within industry that didn’t require a lot of degrees or other prerequisites would be a perfect place for women and minorities to get ahead. On the other hand, because a lot of those industries are not run by professionally trained managers, a lot of the policies often are based on old-fashioned assumptions and stereotypes. Sometimes the industries you think should be the most open are the most closed.”
Given the giant size of the supermarket industry--it is one of the nation’s largest employers, with more than 3 million workers--its actions have broad impact.
Diversity and discrimination are subjects that many leaders in the industry don’t like to discuss. Among the four major supermarket chains in Southern California--Lucky Stores, Ralphs, Stater Bros. and Vons--only Vons and its parent company, Safeway, agreed to provide some statistics on diversity in the executive and management ranks. For Lucky, which agreed to a landmark $107-million settlement in 1994 to end a sex-discrimination case in Northern California, it’s a particularly sore topic.
Goaded by the Lucky case and a continuing stream of other costly sex and racial discrimination lawsuits against the industry in the 1990s, supermarkets have stepped up promotions of women and minorities significantly. Yet moving up to the top ranks can take years, and it still is too early to tell how many of the women and minorities recently elevated into mid-level positions will ever reach the highest rungs.
A Discouraging Experience
The latest government statistics, covering 1997, suggest that getting an entry-level supermarket job hasn’t been unusually hard for women, African Americans or Latinos. For instance, Latinos make up 27.4% of the overall work force in California, yet they account for 28.3% of the people working in the larger supermarkets in the state.
But in the broad category of “officials and managers” at supermarket companies, Latinos account for only 16.8% of the jobs. (The government figures for Asian Americans are less conclusive than those for women, African Americans or Latinos, but they suggest that Asian Americans are underrepresented throughout the supermarket industry’s work force.)
For women such as Nila N. Cook, it sometimes seems impossible to move up. For more than nine years, she worked as a “front-end manager” in Bremen, Ga., for Ingles Markets, one of the largest grocery chains in the Southeast. A front-end manager normally supervises the bookkeeping and cash register operations, but Cook says she also regularly filled in as store manager when the regular manager and assistant manager were away.
Nevertheless, each of the five or six times that openings came up at her supermarket for an assistant manager, Cook was passed over. “They would hire a man every time,” she said.
Cook finally was accepted into an Ingles management-training program last year, but only after she and other female employees lodged discrimination charges with the federal government against the company.
The women also filed a lawsuit claiming that female employees were clustered in cashier, deli and bakery jobs and generally prevented from moving into management or into better-paying departments such as meat, grocery and produce. Ingles quickly agreed to a settlement calling for the company to overhaul its personnel procedures and pay $14.05 million to more than 2,700 female employees.
Blatant employment discrimination, past or present, isn’t the whole story behind the diversity deficit or the tendency to steer people into “men’s jobs” or “women’s jobs.” Experts say difficult-to-change societal patterns and traditions--and a lack of imagination by many supermarket chains in dealing with these issues--also play a role.
For instance, they say, women sometimes hinder their own career advancement because they are more likely than men to turn down night-shift assignments, even when the positions provide valuable work experience.
On top of that, these experts ask, aren’t women’s opportunities limited by the physical demands of some supermarket jobs, such as shelf-stocking and meat-cutting work? And, for child-care reasons, aren’t women more likely than men to take part-time positions as cashiers even if those are career dead ends?
A female manager of a Southern California supermarket who asked not to be identified said that other women at her store often tell her, “I’d never want to do what you do.”
The manager explained that she and other store managers typically work well beyond 50 hours a week. “How do you do that and have a husband and a family?” she said.
When it comes to minorities, are some hindered from applying for supermarket jobs because so many chains avoid putting stores in inner-city neighborhoods? And do the memories of past discrimination and a lack of successful minority role models in the industry deter many people in entry-level jobs from pursuing long-term careers with supermarket chains?
“Very few people like being pioneers,” said Joan G. Haworth, a labor economist retained as an expert witness by supermarket chains hit with discrimination lawsuits.
There are no comprehensive studies comparing supermarkets with other industries on diversity at the executive and upper-management levels. Varying reports, however, suggest that the supermarket business is no better than average, and perhaps far worse, in promoting diversity.
For instance, a survey last year of Fortune 500 companies by New York-based research group Catalyst found that 9% of the corporate officers at supermarket and drugstore companies were women. That figure put the industry slightly below the Fortune 500 average of 11.2%.
But a much grimmer picture was provided by a pair of recent studies in Georgia and Washington state. Those studies, financed by the Ford Foundation, used government data and mathematical formulas to deduce the impact of discrimination in all kinds of jobs.
In Georgia, researchers found that more women and minorities suffer job discrimination in the supermarket business than in any other industry in the state. In Washington, where researchers investigated gender discrimination only, the supermarket industry again was the No. 1 offender.
To be sure, the supermarket business scored poorly in the Ford Foundation studies partly because of the industry’s size rather than because of the severity of its supposed discrimination. Supermarkets employ so many workers that even scattered instances of discrimination affect many people’s lives.
Yet the fact remains that none of the top 20 supermarket companies is headed by a woman or a minority, and even the industry’s defenders concede that it has never seized the opportunity to be a leader in promoting diversity. “It’s comparable to a lot of other industries,” said Todd Hultquist, a spokesman for the Food Marketing Institute, the main trade group for the supermarket industry.
By all accounts, the history of the supermarket industry continues to play a huge role in explaining why so few women and minorities hold top-ranking jobs.
“It’s not a particularly bad or evil industry, but it’s been around for a long time. Its method of doing business was built in the bad old days,” said Barry Goldstein, an Oakland lawyer whose firm has won gender-discrimination settlements in the millions from Lucky, Albertson’s, Safeway and other supermarket companies.
In a 1995 report commissioned by the Food Marketing Institute, researchers found that “job stereotyping continues to hamper the progress of women and minorities. Women usually work in cashier, office and customer service roles, and in specialty departments--which seldom lead to major leadership opportunities.”
Minorities, the report said, generally doubt “that they will be able to advance significantly, even with education and impeccable work records. Even in large store groups, minorities do not see people of color in leadership positions.”
The report also stated that when African Americans are promoted to management positions, they typically are assigned to older, run-down inner-city supermarkets. There, these managers’ careers frequently languish because of their stores’ comparatively poor business performance.
Over the years, many discouraged women and minorities have left supermarkets to pursue other lines of work.
Sam Byrd, a diversity consultant in Boise, Idaho, and the son of migrant farm workers from Mexico, worked at supermarkets during the 1970s when he was in his teens and early 20s. Byrd said he eventually quit because he “didn’t see much of a future. I didn’t think that at some point I was going into management.”
To this day, Byrd says, he hasn’t seen much change in the way supermarket companies regard minority employees. In fact, Byrd says that while his diversity consulting services are in demand from banks, government agencies, food-processing companies and other employers, he normally doesn’t get any inquiries from supermarket chains. “It’s a fairly closed industry,” he said.
“Unless someone is suing them or complaining about their lack of service to a minority community, I don’t think they feel compelled to move in that direction.”
Change Will Take Years
Industry officials, while saying that the supermarket chains are committed to boosting diversity, acknowledge that it will take years to remedy the shortage of women and minorities in top management.
A key reason is that supermarket employees typically are expected to spend at least eight to 10 years working in various departments before they move up to a store manager job. Supermarket executives say the long path to career advancement is standard practice because the industry’s low profit margins leave little room for error. As a result, the argument goes, new managers must be on top of all the details of how their stores operate.
One of the first minorities to beat the odds and reach the top executive ranks was Vons’ Bill Davila, a first-generation Mexican American. He was the company’s president from 1984 to 1992 and continues to serve as Vons’ main commercial spokesman and president emeritus.
Other than his being Latino, Davila’s story mirrors those of many other supermarket industry executives. He got started in the business at the age of 16, sweeping floors at a Vons in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park-Baldwin Hills section. Aside from a four-year stint in the Air Force, Davila never left the company, even working part time during the year he attended community college.
Davila, now 67, still exudes enthusiasm for the supermarket business and says he never encountered any anti-Latino bigotry in his career. Yet he admits that for a long time he never thought twice about some of the gender stereotyping that long existed at Vons.
When Vons bought 162 Safeway stores in Southern California in 1988, Davila says, the company was surprised to find out that the receiving clerks at about a dozen of the acquired stores were women. All of Vons’ receiving clerks--a job requiring bookkeeping and interpersonal skills but not necessarily physical strength--had been men.
“At first we thought, ‘What are we going to do with these 10 or 12 women?’ ” Davila recalled. As it turned out, the women performed their jobs well, and a gender barrier was broken at Vons. The experience, Davila said, “opened our eyes.”
Today, many things have changed at Vons. For starters, it no longer is an independent company. Safeway returned to Southern California in 1997 by buying Vons. And Safeway is headed by Chairman Steven A. Burd, a new breed of supermarket industry executive in that he came to his job six years ago from a career in management consulting rather than up through the ranks of a supermarket chain.
More to the point, Vons and other Safeway chains have adopted practices to promote diversity, much as other supermarket chains and companies in other industries have. Safeway was compelled to step up its diversity efforts under a $7.5-million gender-discrimination settlement it agreed to in 1994.
These days, store managers receive reports half a dozen times a year indicating the ethnic and gender makeup of each of their departments. When store managers undergo their annual appraisals, one of the criteria they are judged on is their success in meeting diversity goals.
The company’s succession-planning process is designed to seek out candidates for future management jobs, all the way down to assistant store manager. The aim is to identify good management prospects, including women and minorities, who otherwise might be overlooked. Critics say that in the past, store managers frequently picked their personal favorites for promotions and that those favorites tended to be people like themselves: white males.
These practices have yet to yield huge changes in the demographic makeup of management at Vons. For instance, only three of the chain’s 18 district managers are minority or female. Still, “if you went back 15 years ago, there probably wouldn’t have been any,” said Kenneth W. Oder, an executive vice president at Safeway who oversees personnel and legal issues.
What’s more, at Safeway’s corporate headquarters in Pleasanton, Calif., two of the top 14 executives are women and three others are minorities. All five were promoted since Burd took over. “We feel like we’re seeing a lot of progress,” Oder said.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Who Gets Promoted at Supermarkets?
Supermarkets nationwide employ many women and minorities. But when it comes to upper-level jobs, white men prevail in this industry, as they do in most others.
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% of % of employees supermarket at supermarket officials/ Category companies managers White men 36.9% 57.9% White women 38.5 28.4 African American men 6.6 3.9 African American women 6.5 2.4 Latino men 5.2 4.0 Latino women 3.8 1.5 Asian/Pacific men 1.1 1.0 Asian/Pacific women 0.9 0.4 Men of all races 50.0 67.1 Women of all races 50.0 32.9
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Note: The figures are gathered from stores across the country that have 50 or more employees. To be included, the stores also must be owned by companies that overall have 100 or more employees. The data are for 1997, the most recent year for which figures are available.
Source: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Making Inroads
Although women and minorities remain underrepresented in the supermarket industry’s upper management, the situation has improved somewhat since 1992.
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% of officials and managers in 1992 in 1997 White men 64.2% 57.9% White women 25.0 28.4 African American men 3.4 3.9 African American women 1.7 2.4 Latino men 3.3 4.0 Latino women 1.0 1.5 Asian/Pacific men 0.9 1.0 Asian/Pacific women 0.3 0.4 Men of all races 72.0 67.1 Women of all races 28.0 32.9
*--*
Note: The figures are gathered from stores across the country that have 50 or more employees. To be included, the stores also must be owned by companies that overall have 100 or more employees. The data are for 1997, the most recent year for which figures are available.
Source: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
