You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Think of a food a child in your life refuses to eat. Or glance back to your own childhood. Something you, as an adult, now find heavenly as you anticipate that first bite.
I’ve long held a theory that there are certain items that should be made adults-only, you kiddies keep your hands away.
We could begin with asparagus, Brussels sprouts, clams and mussels. Coffee, beer, and wine are no-brainers. Maybe even lobster or lamb or Swiss cheese or spinach or salmon.
What would you add to that list?
A comment from Martha Schaefer got this ball rolling.
She was confessing that she never liked Brussels sprouts until her ex-husband, “an excellent cook,” introduced her to what happens when the tiny cabbages are cooked well. And, of course, that changed everything.
My, that could even get us going on a crimes-against-foods rant, considering how many vegetables, fruits, meats, and so on are abused in kitchens around the globe.
For now, though, let’s consider an overlooked aspect of broken relationships. Think of something positive you’ve carried away from an ex-spouse or lover. What were you introduced to that you now treasure or delight in?
A special place, perhaps, or food or beverage, music or art, literature or activity, friends or family, even (maybe most of all) lovemaking.
What comes to mind? Or your heart? Pipe up!
As I blogged during the summer of 2014, the No. 1 topic of discussion across much of New England concerned the dramatic battle for control of the Market Basket supermarket chain. In an unprecedented reaction to moves by one-half of the family owning the company to sell the popular stores to more expensive rivals, its management, devoted workers, trusted suppliers, and loyal shoppers united to bring the enterprise itself to a halt. A grinding halt. And it worked.
After months of earlier rebuffs and daily headlines, the part of the family actually running the stores announced an agreement to buy the entire operation from its hostile relations.
It was a complicated story, with some long-festering feuds in the not-so-recent background. The kind of story that’s bound to show up as movie adaptations. Maybe even as a television mini-series. Maybe not Dallas in Boston, but as rich in its material.
We’ve been waiting for the book-length analyses, and the first one is finally making the rounds: We Are Market Basket (the title comes from a slogan at the time) has been published by an American Management Association affiliate.
Authors are frequently advised to “know their audience,” with the implication of tailoring their work to assumed demands. In this case, the book can be seen aiming at two audiences: New Englanders who remember the revolt and likely participated in some part of it, and then business majors and managers around the world. It’s both a strength and weakness for the volume.
Reading the text, it’s easy to see which part was written by which coauthor: Lowell Sun newspaper reporter Grant Walker drafted the day-by-day narrative, while associate business professor Daniel Korschun provided the chapters on business management. It’s all good stuff, though a bit repetitive, as one might expect from daily news reports that have to recap earlier developments. And I started wishing Walker had more sources to draw on. Still, they underscore the point of their book.
As the subtitle says, The Story of the Unlikely Grassroots Movement That Saved a Beloved Business, this was a remarkable event. Korschum uses it as a platform to argue for an awareness of stakeholders in a company – not just stockholders. It’s a theme Bernie Sanders has been pressing in his presidential campaign, and he’s not alone it saluting its importance. Workers, suppliers, and entire communities have investments of one sort or another in the companies that operate in our presence. For Market Basket, with prices typically 16 percent lower than its major competition, customers have a definite reason for supporting the stores, which, as it turns out, are remarkably profitable, despite or (as Korschum argues and others of us believe) because of their culture of contrarian instincts.
You can read the book for the reasons why. The list of down-to-earth practices throughout the operation, where the lowest level workers are encouraged to find ways to improve the business, is worth the read alone. You won’t walk through any store quite the same afterward.
My interest in the topic goes back decades before this, as I saw the operations of a smaller but similar grocery operation run by my then-girlfriend’s father. His own father had started out with a produce cart that went door to door. Besides, my own inclination has been for smaller, typically family, operations rather than monolithic corporations – as I demonstrate in my novel Hometown News and pursued for most of my employment as a journalist.
As I was perusing We Are Market Basket, I kept thinking of business books like Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence series. They’re fun to read and make their point, though there just might be more to the story. In this case, I definitely feel there is.
Yes, when we come to the stakeholders argument, we can look to John Henry Patterson’s benevolent leadership at the National Cash Register Co. in Dayton, Ohio, or the glory years of the cereal makers in Battle Creek, Michigan, or Aaron Feuerstein’s moves in the aftermath of the Polar Fleece fabrics’ devastating factory fire in Malden, Massachusetts. Essentially, these provide similar models of enlightened leadership along the stakeholders’ ideal. But this book also leaves me wondering about the next generation after Arthur T. Demoulas’ leadership – he is, after all, pictured riding a white horse. So there’s a need for a management text on maintaining leadership a generation or two down the pike, which this book glides over as one of simply maintaining the historic company culture. There’s a lot of repetition on Market Basket’s culture in these pages, perhaps to drive the point home or, as I suspect, perhaps because of slack editing. But will that culture be enough?
On another front, there’s a volume yet to appear that puts the Market Basket experience in perspective with other leader-defined companies. Yes, we love our heroes, but they’re hardly the stuff of corporate America these days. More often, they’re anonymous and invisible. What kind of executive would be needed to fill Arther T.’s shoes?
And there’s another round of writings that might relate Market Basket to other family-owned companies and their survival or failure in moving from one generation to another. Family ownership issues have become a distinct subset of a business school curriculum. You don’t get fired from being a brother or a sister or cousin or grandkid — it’s a lifetime position.
We Are Market Basket skims over the earlier family conflicts that erupted into ugly, protracted, and costly court battles only years before the events at the heart of this book. To understand the bitterness of the most recent round, I’d love to see a volume – or at least one more open to both sides – more detailed than what this one presents. Not that the other side made itself in any way sympathetic in the 2014 accounts. Even so, the events were not quite as black-or-white as they seem to appear. An astute reader senses the authors’ desire not to antagonize their sources, meaning the book’s told basically from one side.
Another fascinating dimension also appears in corporate ownership that’s not quite split evenly 50/50. Television viewers may remember an episode of Ed Asner’s Lou Grant series where the newspaper was threatened by such a division – not that much different from the Seattle Times, actually, where one percent held the sway vote.
When it comes to Market Basket, we have one crucial family voter who switched. Why? Everyone wants to know.
So I’m still hoping for a more definitive volume than this entry. Maybe by the crack team from the Boston Globe, which could throw far more reporters at the story than the suburban Lowell Sun could – reporter/author Welker at least had the advantage of having the Demoulas family grocery stores originating in Lowell and putting their headquarters one town over, in Tewksbury, but he was a Lone Ranger in the face of a large reporting and editing staff in Boston.
Another of the case studies waiting to happen would look at Market Basket since the uprising. Can it sustain the large debt load and still maintain its generous employee bonuses and profit-sharing, along with its low prices? A year-after report by the Globe found that the company is indeed prospering in its rebirth. But long-term questions remain.
Will the fuller story ever come out?
For me, more and more, I’m looking for another current example, somewhat the way scientists want an experiment that can be replicated — another stakeholder over stockholder victory.
In the meantime, we’re still shopping – almost religiously – at Market Basket.
Maintaining particular elements that set a faith community apart from the larger society as well as a desire to be like everyone else provokes a basic tension in religious history. In Quaker tradition, we see it especially in the Hicksite Separation and later, with the Gurneyites, as many Friends adopted pastoral worship and turned their meetinghouses into “churches,” sometimes complete with a bell. The problem that arises along the way is that other values, like the Peace Witness, can also be eroded on the road to a generic Protestant practice or New Age miasma. (Or, increasingly these days, both.)
It’s important that we remain aware of what are known as “distinctives” – in our stream of Quakerism, the unprogrammed worship, simple meetinghouses, and decision-making process are highly obvious. Once, our discipline of Plain dress and speech, our system of “guarded education” in Quaker parochial schools, and our avoidance of public entertainments would have also set us apart. Scholars look for distinctives when they examine a spectrum ranging from sect to denomination, where something like the presence of an American flag in the sanctuary can say much about how far the congregation buys into the values of the surrounding culture. (The Mennonite fellowship I participated in was viewed with some suspicion because we enjoyed going to Baltimore Orioles games – together, at that. Ahem.) Often, it’s seen as those scholars look to reasons one Amish group differs from another. The width of a man’s hat band, for instance, or even buttons. It’s the way the little things add up to strengthen more important matters. I’m not saying any of this is easy.
Once, while dining in Little Italy in Baltimore, I overheard a couple talking to the co-owner of a restaurant. They were telling him how, on a visit to New York, they kept hearing everyone speak about how his place was the best one back home. Finally, he interrupted, saying, “If you don’t believe you’re the best restaurant in Little Italy, you shouldn’t be here.” While some people detect a degree of arrogance in that, I sense a humility and an admiration of his competitors – a desire for excellence and an admiration for those touches that make each restaurant distinctive. Ways that encourage each other to do better, too.
I turn that to our own neighboring faith communities with an admiration for congregations that uphold their own meaningful distinctives. Each one, with the potential of enriching the others. We Friends need not add glittering icons or glorious pipe organs or triune water baptism to our service, but we can dialogue and even worship with those who have them – and maybe all come away with deeper amazement and resolve in our own daily practice.
Hey, it was only a month ago I was reveling in Greek dancing — admittedly, not as part of the Orthodox service but certainly as part of the community. Along with all of the food.
Bingo! Basil!
As they say …
Homemade and very tasty. Sometimes ours has raisins. And sometimes dried cherries. Dried pears were a special occasion.
Three hundred sunny days a year in a fertile land may seem like Paradise.
But it’s surrounded by desert.
~*~
Desert turns everything to bone. That, or to stone. Even the scattered tufts of cheat grass and the isolated clusters of flowers turn into straw skeletons. Social conventions, too, dry away. In pursuing clarity, which parched spreads possess abundantly, I also enter an order of madness. Paradoxically, to preserve my sanity in dealing with people, it becomes periodically necessary for me to revisit this incomprehensible delirium. Settle back on this my bedrock, readjust to my own frame. Here, then, I return afresh to spaces within and without. Wait. Listen. In this place, wind is a clearing, spiraling on itself. Then, when this twisting reverses, screwing into bony alkaline soil, we give praise. At times, I even see my own heart clearly. As I come to know my way around more securely, I lift a cup of clear spring water and pour it on bleached parchment at my feet. Selah. The next day a bouquet of tiny flowers rises like fingers bent by wind. Always somewhere, wind.
~*~
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These days, the Greek Orthodox community has much more substance – and influence – in Dover than do the Friends, even though Quakers once formed a third of the population.
Our plumber, our wine retailer, our favorite meat store, the downtown seafood restaurant … the list goes on. Add a daughter’s boyfriend, one-half of his genetic pool. The local congregation’s participation in the ecumenical Thanksgiving service. Or its annual Labor Day weekend festival and traditional food and dancing.
Even so, it’s a largely invisible presence … and quite a legacy, as I’ve been discovering, step by step. Let me add, a very tolerant circle, too, as they’ve welcomed me to the line in dancing. Oh, my, have they!
With its cloudless skies, it could be an ideal agricultural cornucopia. If you had water.
~*~
In other climates, you commonly overlook the element of space, unless looking into the heavens on a brittle night. You observe objects, and space becomes the measure of distance between an object and you, or else some arrangement of objects. In contrast, desert appears more as a vacuum — a juxtaposition of surfaces, of sky and earth extending outward not to some imaged convergence (such as the perspective point where the twin rails of a train track become one) but rather away from any focus, and thus outward around both of the observer’s ears. Here, space itself becomes obvious, as if turned upright, like a wall in your face. So often in life, what should be most obvious is the hardest to see. The spider is on the window; the spider is on this page.
~*~
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Ever look back and wonder when you first encountered an item that’s now one of your go-to menu items?
Oh, I can remember when pizzas first invaded our neighborhood – the smell of oregano easily triggers that preschool memory!
But the Greek wrap called a gyro – and pronounced HE-ro – remains a mystery. I may have discovered it, along with souvlaki, in the late ’70s in the University District of Seattle, back when we’d visit from the interior desert. Or it may have come from a takeout place we ordered from at the newspaper, a decade-and-a-half later.
I do remember a heavenly example from a wood-fired stove at the Common Ground Fair in Unity, Maine, back in 2002 – along with a wait in a very long line.
More recently, it’s been the highlight of dinner before our weekly choir rehearsals in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Just remember, no onions on mine, please.
Jnana's Red Barn 