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Only foodies need apply

By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published June 18, 2006

As the theme from Jaws thumped in the background, they stomped this symbol of rival Publix to bits, then fed the pieces into the maw of a colleague dressed in a felt shark costume.

Such histrionics, part of a recent Sweetbay employee training night, were less about stirring up competitive juices and more about convincing the grocery chain's workers that they need to get more passionate - fast - about customer service.

Taking a page from coaches who post a competitor's boasts for locker room motivation, Sweetbay managers had just played a Publix radio spot to fire up the troops. The commercial claimed "other" grocers' customer service fades fast after those flashy store grand openings. But, the announcer intoned, at Publix, "quality and customer service never goes away."

The only supermarket other than Publix to stage more than one grand reopening on Florida's west coast in the past three years, Sweetbay's leaders took the ad personally.

"That commercial tells you Publix regards us as pests they want to swat out like gnats," said Sweetbay district manager Mike Hall. "We cannot afford to ever let our new customer-friendly commitment ease up."

Added Joe Orzko, an assistant store manager: "We have to make this happen permanently or this ship is going to sink."

The raucous gathering at Hunter's Green Country Club, meant to psych up the staff for the reopening of their Kash n' Karry in New Tampa as the 40th Sweetbay Supermarket, had the look of a pep rally. It's part of a customer service training effort as the Tampa chain reinvents itself.

Sweetbay's Belgian parent, Delhaize Group, is pouring several hundred million dollars into the overhaul of a tired corporate culture. But as the rebranding

rolls through 71 remaining Kash n' Karry stores in the Tampa Bay area over the next 18 months, executives say remodeling stores, expanding the selection by 13,000 items and taking the food quality up a notch alone won't cut it.

"If we don't deliver with attentive employees that shoppers trust and want to interact with, none of it's going to matter," said Shelley Broader, president and chief executive officer of the supermarket chain, whose new name is taken from a type of magnolia tree. "The employees are not the frosting on the cake. They are the cake."

Trying to "out-Publix Publix'' has long been considered a suicidal move among Tampa Bay area grocers. But no traditional grocer can compete with Wal-Mart Supercenters on price, so Broader sees Publix's huge market share 41 percent of Florida grocery sales as evidence that top-notch customer service has become a survival imperative.

Behavior modification is dicey business, especially getting workers to go the extra mile for some jobs that pay from $6.50 an hour for a bagger to $14 an hour for a veteran meat cutter. Training and the relentless attention of managers have long been a driving force behind Publix Super Markets' ability to win top customer service ratings from Consumer Reports. But Winn-Dixie tried to ramp up service five years ago. It wasn't enough to stop a continued market share erosion that forced the company into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

"We're changing the look of the store, but my focus is to change how it feels to shop there," said Steve Campbell, Sweetbay's vice president of human resources, who brought the company's all-but-forgotten training department back to life. "We are sending out a message that these are no longer head-down jobs. We expect our people to engage the customer, acknowledge their presence, strike up a conversation with them and take responsibility to help them."

The formal training begins a few weeks before a remodeled store is opened. It hinges on creating an environment of teamwork and building worker confidence to engage customers - and knowing when to leave them alone. Every worker spends an evening tasting some of the 160 speciality foods that only Sweetbay sells, then learns talking points to recommend the 20 most popular ones such as blueberry sausage, Key West shrimp and sour cream donuts. New work rules are laid out to empower even entry-level workers to make decisions to help customers rather than wait for a manager's approval.

It's all a dramatic change for a company that for years enforced rigid rules, encouraged workers to wait for raises by staying in the same jobs and offered customers a store experience that has been at best uneven.

With 8,500 employees and plans to beef that up to 10,000 to fully staff all 109 Sweetbay stores by the end of 2007, Campbell's team is not just trying to instill a new customer-centric way of doing business. They are imposing the new culture on a workplace that has been whipsawed back and forth under five sets of owners' cost-cutting for the past 15 years. Store managers are getting even more training. Some are getting the boot. Entry-level job turnover exceeds 100 percent a year. So the key to making the culture stick, Campbell says, is getting the core opinion leaders - the roughly 2,000 people who have worked full-time at Kash n' Karry at least 10 years - to buy into the new approach.

The program is designed to weed out those unwilling to go along for the ride. The hints are easy to spot.

A half dozen of the typical 100-employee store's payroll quit after the wacky training sessions. About 10 percent of applicants back out after they encounter a quiz examining their interest in talking about food. (What are the ingredients in your favorite recipe? What is your favorite restaurant? What three items will always be found in your refrigerator?)

In training sessions, the lessons have been reduced to four simple sentences that are developed and reinforced through repetition in goofy group games. Gift-certificate prizes ease the embarrassment of having to boogaloo the ''fish dance'' - a free-form interpretative number left to the imagination of the participant - past a phalanx of fellow workers. Even the store manager joins the silliness, designed to relax boundaries that separate fellow workers.

Staring at a 10-minute deadline, departments compete to brainstorm ways to translate the Sweetbay brand attributes into strategies for their departments, then craft a logo and a theme song that sums it up.

"Don't you wish you were fresh like me,'' goes a hip-hop tune delivered with enough arm-waving by the produce department chorus to obscure the lack of content or rhyme. "Don't you wish were sweet like me. Don't you wish you were shopping at Sweetbay. Because it's sooooo sweet.''

Other exercises sought how to solve problems such as the customer whose custom birthday cake is made out to the wrong name after the cake decorator left.

Train someone on the late shift to decorate cakes, said one stock clerk. Offer a free replacement and call another store to have it delivered, offered another. Ask if the customer minds someone removing the offending icing to give it another shot.

The training sessions, however, are only the start.

Each Sweetbay has a full-time coordinator (Campbell, a former IBM executive, calls them "culture navigators'') to coach workers on service techniques, encourage fresh sales tactics and chat with customers to see what worked and what needs to be done.

Work rules were altered so managers can delegate decision-making to resolve routine problems and make employees feel they are part of the program. For the first time, a store and department's financial performance is shared with workers, ending an old taboo. Any employee, not just the boss, can alert a waiting relief team to staff registers during a rush. Clerks are encouraged to take returns worth a token amount rather than wait for a manager.

Promised promotions if they do well for 12 to 18 months, coordinators find morale building a small part of the job.

Christina Cruz, a 20 year-old USF student who is coordinator at a Tampa store, frequently convenes small huddles in stores where customers chat over free food samples or employees learn about each other.

One of her favorite devices: free Skittles to workers if they share something about themselves with colleagues that their colleagues don't know.

"Some people love our new way of doing business,'' she said. "Some - mostly longtime people who got set in their ways - don't. So you just let it go. A lot of customers have noticed the changes, but this is a process. We're not going to change overnight.''

Still, many employees love the attention they think will help them enjoy jobs once considered drudgery.

"When I started two weeks ago I thought this was going to be just another short-term job," said Ray Doll, a 21-year-old cashier from Tampa. "Now I'm thinking I'll be with this company a long time."

Lindsay Perez, 56, is a deli clerk from Wesley Chapel.

"After 18 years in food retailing I've always believed customer service is the key. But I've heard this hype before and it usually just turns into empty promises,'' she said. ''But frankly, this is real. I've seen tangible evidence of it already and, frankly, it's pretty neat."

The trick is sustaining the new attitude year in and year out. Publix stores, for instance, recently bought checkout computer screens that pick up a customer's name from his or her payment card and displays it on the screen to the clerk. Clerks in many stores were able to thank shoppers by name, but after a few weeks they stopped making the effort.

The Sweetbay transformation worked in the Naples/Fort Myers and Sarasota/Bradenton markets, where the job was completed over the past two years. Sales in stores open more than a year there rose 19 percent in 2005, and the trend held up through the first half of 2006.

But in Sarasota/Bradenton, Sweetbay, which opened no stores, lost market share to Publix, which added two stores, and Wal-Mart, which doubled its Supercenters to six. Under the Sweetbay banner, the company's market share slumped from 14 to 11 percent behind Publix's 43 percent and Wal-Mart's 21 percent, according to Trade Dimensions International.

Sweetbay reported solid sales gains because it's regaining business lost years ago when rivals built stores right across the street from old Kash n' Karry stores, which had suffered double-digit sales declines. Internal surveys within the 2-mile radius of most Sweetbay stores show the new look and way of doing business is gaining customers from rivals.

In the Tampa Bay area market, the company has been able to stabilize its eroding share as a strong third place at 16 percent of the market thanks to the opening of the first 12 Sweetbays. Albertsons, which was recently sold to new owners, and Winn-Dixie continued to shed business in a decadelong slide.

"In this environment, not losing market share means you're winning,'' said CEO Broader. "People try you out again after a remodeling, but it's hard to change shopping habits once somebody learned how to march to right where the mayonnaise is in a competitor's store. It takes a year to win back a regular.''

Mark Albright can be reached at albright@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8252.

[Last modified June 18, 2006, 05:58:28]