Winco Vs WalMart

The other Day my wife started coming home with brown paper bags full of groceries with the word Winco stamped on the front.

She was telling my how much money she saved by shopping there. Less than the local super stores, a lot less. It made me suspicious, a little. Checked the expiration dates, all fine, checked to make sure the food wasn’t coming from China or other questionable quality control countries, nope everything made here in the U.S., Brand name stuff. Scratched my Head, WTF? how is it they are so frigge'n cheap?

What’s the deal?, Gas is pushing $5 a gallon, everything through the roof, gas companies being grilled by the government being asked, How could you do this to people and their smug response, "Supply and demand", Apparently thats an excuse to do things that are morally corrupt. Basically they are screwing people over because they can and you have no choice. U.S. Executives who are making the corrupt decisions to own you, and now its time you pay them to excess.

Screw success now a days in the corporate world, they all want far above and beyond, they want excess. Excess is when you take the morals out of success and take and take, with no regards to families and being a human being.

So anyhow, WinCo, what are they doing that they undercut everyone’s prices? What’s the deal, what’s the scam? How can they keep the prices for actual living wage people Vs the constant 10%-20% price hikes every time the gas price goes up $0.10

So I hopped online to check out the WinCo Corporation to see if it was a branch of Walmart or some other place, though I doubted it, as the Walton family are anything but Moral in their operations or judgments. The other thing that was bugging me is why can they operate at a reasonable level when no other store in America can do this.

Turns out the reason why WinCo can operate the way they do is because they are in fact NOT a publicly traded corporation. There are no top heavy, as in multi Billion dollar paid executives with their own plush benefits that takes 99.998% of the profits leaving the rest of the corporate system to struggle over the last 0.001% of the profit structure. (Direct Quotes from Jackass magazine folks)

They are privately owned by the employees who work there. Everyone from the top management to the lowly bagger has the exact same benefits, exact same medical and dental, Same vacation and same profit sharing structure.

So it seems it isn’t top heavy at all like every other corporation in America because it isn’t a corporate structure with public stock.

It’s a company that is privately owned by the employees with private stock. The stock is not determined through the public but through a private assessment company. Financial compensation and structure is done with the 9,200+ employees who all have a say in the company payout and structure.

So unlike a corporation where three people determine the structure and compensation for everyone else. Everyone determines what the 0.01% of the top brass is going to get. There is no runaway executive getting hundreds of millions of dollars, with a multi-million compensation package for getting fired due to miss use and negligence of corporate resources. They are treated like everyone else in the company. They are their own check and balance structure, unlike other Corporations.

They are in every sense of the word “Success”, Not “excess”

So it turns out WinCo, is the model of a company structure that all companies should follow. A structure with checks and balance, a structure where the employees, not a disinterested third party individual with extra money to burn, driven by greed, who invests in them, that determine the direction the company will move and how the company will operate.

It is literally owned by the employees, operated by the employees, and the employees determine the structure of the company. You wont find grossly negligent and incompetent managers because the employees will fire them. If you work there, you got to actually know what the heck your doing, not simply have a degree from Harvard.

So unlike the share holders of public companies that demand Microsoft like returns at the expense of employees and customers alike, these guys are making a living and treating themselves and their customers fairly.

So now we shop at WinCo. It’s not a super fancy place to shop, it’s not all about presentation and environment at the cost of your pocket book, its about supplying a demand and making a reasonable living in the process.

Like the 85% of us non-"excess" executives here in America, who are simply trying to make a living and do a job well, And I gotta say they are doing the job right on every level of the word "Right".

You can operate and make a profit and live well without raping your employees and customers, and WinCo seems to be operating under that understanding.

The biggest thing they have going for them?

The fact it’s run by employees and not managers who reside in an office in some far away city, who never touch a product and feel they are above manual labor or associating with the people who make the company's profit and make the company operate.

Check them out.. http://www.wincofoods.com/

As long as they operate by the employees with the employees as top priority, They will get my business whenever possible. Unlike WalMart who will only get my finger as I drive by. I refuse to shop at WalMart! and put the world of pressure on my wife to never shop there for anything.

So they get a clean bill of health, and a hope that other businesses will take them as an operational example of the right way to do business. They are the living proof that you can operate succeed and make a very decent profit while supplying a real service and treating employees as what they really are, as Assets, not as Liabilities.