Sowing Seeds of Gratitude

By Clem Nilan, General Manager

Maybe you noticed the American Flatbread mobile oven in our back parking lot on Wednesday, May 23?  This oven (and the wonderful flatbread that emerges from it) has been the centerpiece of our staff picnics for the past two years. Flatbread, salads, cold beverages and cookies were served to staff from 11am to 7pm as part of a Staff Appreciation Party. In addition, we offered up free chair massages in our pop-up tent as an extra thank you.

Our Co-op is a rollicking place of business. Sales are booming. Our aisles and parking lot are crowded. Every day our staff faces the task of receiving truckloads of food through the loading dock doors, stocking all these products on shelves, preparing hundreds of meals for our hot & cold food bar and our grab and go cooler, and then cashing out patrons and bagging groceries (not to mention all the maintenance, paperwork and other support functions that go into operating a busy retail store).

The other day a small staff sandwich unit pumped out over 500 sandwiches. Parents and students were leaving town and they were fueling up on the way home. I'm proud to say our staff handles this and the usual multitude of daily tasks extremely well.  I constantly hear compliments from our members on our staff’s work ethic and friendly customer service in some pretty hectic conditions.

One metric we use to measure the Co-op’s level of activity is sales per square foot. Achieving $1,000 in sales per square foot is considered a sign that a co-op ought to start thinking about expansion. We’re at $2,000 in sales per square foot … with no sign that business is slowing down.

We appreciate every one of our staff members and the many ways that they contribute to our Co-op’s success. We do this year round by offering livable wages and a strong benefits package. And we do this in smaller ways with monthly birthday and anniversary cakes, walking and biking challenges, sponsoring teams for fun runs and marathons, hosting blood pressure screenings, leading staff farm tours and hosting flatbread parties.

We just celebrated our 10th anniversary at 82 South Winooski Avenue and we have several staff members whose employment predates this location. To those staff members, to the ones who started today and all those in between, we are grateful. As a cooperative, we know that our members want to ensure fair staff treatment. We wanted to remind you that we agree and we’ve got it covered. We’re sincerely grateful for our current Co-op team and excited about the possible opportunities that expansion will offer both customers and staff.