Word: chaine
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Gouge-as-Gouge-Can. The Giant's House is an old-fashioned gouge-as-gouge-can story of business success. An immigrant boy from Ireland, John Horgan has clobbered his way to the top of a chain of supermarkets. Brutal, foulmouthed, yet strangely charming in his roguish, broguish way, he keeps his junior executives underpaid and forever conscious that they must undersell the rival A & P. Horgan's law is that "you never know where bottom is until you probe for it." In one hilariously horrible probing match with Horgan Co., a pudgy little enamelware dealer seems lucky...
...first full year at National Tea (which operates under the name National Food Stores), McNamara boosted sales from $107 million to $158 million, profits from $913,000 to $2,900,000. In 1953 he squeezed out First National to make National Tea the nation's fifth largest supermarket chain. Last year, when sales reached $520 million, profits $6,500,000, the company became the tenth largest of all retailers...
...Park, selling newspapers and score cards. He quit school at twelve, drove a team of horses for a local grocer for $4 a week and, at 21, failed at running his own grocery. In 1917 he took a job in a St. Louis store of the Kroger chain, eventually became chief trouble-shooter for the whole chain (3,174 stores). He quit to join National Tea because Kroger rejected his ideas for extensive reorganization on the grounds that the company was already doing well. Says McNamara: "Hell, the time to make changes is when you are doing all right...
...National, McNamara found trouble everywhere. After the death in 1936 of George S. Rasmussen, its Danish immigrant founder (in 1899), the company went into the red. Finally, John McKinlay, a former president of Marshall Field & Co., got control. Under him, the chain stayed in the red till 1940, when the war put it into the black. McNamara found the chain burdened by paper work and centralized control that failed to respond to local needs. McNamara set up nine semiautonomous branches, whose managers do their own buying, advertising and pricing. He bought out nine competing companies (358 stores), closed up white...
...same time, McNamara raised the chain's advertising budget tenfold, to $5,500,000 last year, including 5,560,000 lines in 25 major metropolitan newspapers, where National had 2,000,000 lines more than any other single company. He has cut markups from an average of 25% to 15%, brightened his stores with new color schemes, electric-eye doors, air conditioning and new packaging techniques, especially for meat. He has achieved almost complete self-service (for an average of 5,000 items) in many of his stores, and hopes soon to make it 100% everywhere...