Text b Business Principle: Supermarket Shopping Should Be Fun To Stew Leonard, the distinction between a supermarket and an amusement park is slight, and not necessarily useful.

“Everyone feels supermarket shopping is drudgery,¹” Mr. Leonard said in an interview in his office overlooking the selling floor. “I try to make it fun”.

Mr. Leonard clearly has the most fun greeting customers, and most are delighted to see him. As he made his way through the produce² section during the interview, Dr. Shelley Dreisman of Westport, Connecticut, happily shook his hand, but her daughter, Emily, age six, shyly turned away. “She only wants to shake hands with the cow,” Dr. Dreisman explained.

That cow, it turns out, is often Mr. Leonard, too. When the burdens of running a $100 million business seem too great, he puts on a cow suit he keeps in his office closet and goes out and hugs customers…

Outside the store, in the parking lot, there is a petting zoo, a collection of live barnyard animals including geese, calves, baby goats, and sheep.

Even the petting zoo serves several purposes. Mr. Leonard talks of it as an afterthought. When he sought to buy the property twenty years ago, the elderly woman, who owned it insisted on keeping her farm animals on it.

Now, farmers lend him baby animals, which he periodically exchanges for younger models. The farmers like the arrangement because the animals come back well fed. Mr. Leonard pays for part of their diet, but the animals also get food from shoppers, who buy it in the store.

Notes:

1. unpleasant work;

2. fruits and vegetables.

Text C

Business Principle: Listen to the Customer

Stew Leonard elicits opinions from his supermarket customers through monthly customer interviews, called focus groups, and a suggestion box. Every day over 100 suggestions are received, typed up, and distributed to the appropriate departments. He tries out many of these suggestions, even if they seem unlikely.

According to Mr. Leonard, two recent pieces of success came from customer ideas put into the suggestion box.

One was to sell strawberries loose, like tomatoes, in the big flat trays from the farm, not in plastic one-pint (0.551 liter) baskets.

The produce manager said that if the strawberries were set out loose, people would eat them and the leftovers would never sell. He turned out to be right, but customers who can choose strawberries individually will drop them into plastic bags without watching the total, Mr. Leonard discovered, and some will buy twelve dollars worth. Sales tripled.

Then there were the turkey dinners. Mr. Leonard was selling them with vegetable and stuffing¹, fresh but refrigerated, at $5.59 each, and roasting just three turkeys a day in the store’s kitchens to keep up with demand. A customer suggested selling them at the hot-food²bar, a growing part of the business; so he did, and demand jumped to twenty-one turkeys a day.

But some customers said they did not like paying $2.99 a pound for the gravy mixed in, or that the gravy had too many calories. Others said there was not enough gravy. So he started putting the gravy on the side³, and demand rose to more than fifty turkeys a day.

Notes:

1. filling made of bread and spices;

2. area inside the store where hot food is sold;

3. in a separate container.