DOING RIGHT at ShopRite B Guided by the Kenny
family, the supermarket gives back to the Delaware community it serves By Larry Nagengast
3_Wilmington_Profile.indd 2
ernie Kenny’s first job, about 60 years ago in Elizabeth, N.J., was as a “cart boy”—you know, the kid who rounds up stray carts in the supermarket parking lot and arranges them by the door. “He grew up poor. He dropped out of school. He hates to see people who feel like they’re stuck,” his daughter Melissa says. That’s why, she says, when Bernie is out in the parking lot at the ShopRite Supermarket on the Wilmington Riverfront, she has heard him tell some of the new hires, “I was a cart guy once. Work hard. Maybe you can own your own supermarket someday.” Yes, Bernie Kenny, the 74-year-old CEO of Delaware Supermarkets Inc., owns the ShopRite on the Riverfront as well as four others—in Brandywine Hundred, Bear, Stanton and Newark. After a career spent primarily with Pathmark as a store manager and corporate executive, Kenny bought the Stanton and Brandywine ShopRites in January 1995. “Pathmark had changes in leadership, and started running things differently,” Melissa Kenny explains. “He wanted to get back to what the business was like when he started, to cater to the community he was working in.” Wakefern, the cooperative to which ShopRite belongs, recruited Kenny and encouraged him to buy the two stores, says Dan Tanzer, marketing director of Delaware Supermarkets Inc. (DSI). Under Bernie’s direction, DSI acquired the Newark market and built the new Riverfront and Bear markets. In the next few years, ShopRite could add as many as five more markets in Delaware,
2/22/12 4:18 PM