Word: setting
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...growth was just beginning. Mindful of George's early success with the baking powder, the brothers decided they could sell even cheaper by making still more of their goods. They started "Quaker Maid" factories to make A & P's own "Ann Page" preserves, peanut butter, etc. They set up their own American Coffee Corp. to buy direct from the growers in Brazil and Colombia. Still trying to eliminate middlemen, they set up their own Atlantic Commission Co. to buy the stores' produce. They started their own bakeries, candy and pastry shops to turn out everything from...
Young George was just as frugal as his mother. It was he who started trimming costs by getting A & P to manufacture its own products. When George learned that baking powder consisted only of soda and a carbonate, he screened off part of the Vesey Street store and set a chemist to turning it out. But it was bold, adventurous John who gave A & P its biggest shove, and made it continent-spanning in fact as well as name...
Increased size inevitably brought severer headaches. Years earlier the Hartfords had set up teams of traveling auditors to check price tags and weights in all the stores and report back to them directly, thus keeping tabs on the empire. There was always the chance that a dishonest store manager would overcharge, short-change or underweigh. But honest managers also were squeezed. They got so little leeway in their allowances for breakage, spoilage and pilfering that some of them felt they had to cut honesty corners to make a good competitive showing...
...John stormed back to the Graybar Building determined to cull out all such flipmagilding. He sat down and personally signed letters to 40,000 men & women in his employ warning them, on penalty of discharge, that every A & P customer "must get 16 ounces to every pound." Moreover, John set up a big board at headquarters to mark every supermarket's quarterly showing, raised hob whenever one turned up the white card indicating a "stock gain," i.e., a dollar "take" exceeding the retail value of all goods sold, a sign of possible overcharging or short-weighing. Now, says...
...Hartfords hope that their empire will outlast themselves, and have set up a line of succession. They have put their own two-fifths of A & P stock in a foundation, and made A & P's President Ralph Burger one of its trustees.* Thus Burger, who started with A & P 40 years ago and drove one of the red tea wagons, will run the company providing the owners of the other 60% of stock agree. The chances are they will, unless the trustbusters succeed in breaking...