BELLINGHAM, Wash. — Working in a grocery store often limits your world to the four walls around you, while going to school to learn more about the food business exposes you to a wider world, Jeffrey Juckel, general manager for the Oregon division of Haggen Inc. here, told SN.
Juckel had worked for a couple of independents in Washington for 15 years — rising from box-boy to store manager — before he began attending Portland State University, “and the four walls around me were my world,” he said.
“But the university experience taught me how the store is related to the entire supply chain and to what's going on in the community and nationally and how that affects your store, and that was really an eye-opener for me.”
Juckel went to PSU in the late 1980s to major in marketing and advertising but ended up in the Food Industry Leadership Center program, which was in its “fledgling days,” he pointed out.
His experience there led to his being hired by Haggen as night manager for one of its TOP Foods locations.
“What the university gave me was a better understanding of the job and how to take more things into consideration — to think more about the community and how it affects your store and the value of interacting with the community and other business-people that can bring more business into your store.
“Education allows you to move from being a shopkeeper stocking shelves to a merchant serving the community.”
The university experience also helped him better understand the financial aspect of the business.
“Without the knowledge from those classes, I would never have known how to do that and how to understand concepts like EBITDA and debt-to-equity ratios,” Juckel said.
The school also helped him realize the potential for job advancement, he said.
Juckel had moved from night manager to grocery manager to store manager by the time Haggen sent him to the Midwest for a one-week program sponsored by Food Marketing Institute at Hillsdale College near Chicago. Shortly afterward, the company suggested he enroll in the Food Industry Marketing Program at the University of Southern California.
“What I hoped to get at USC was what I didn't get at Portland State because they didn't offer it when I went there — the specific academic background in all different aspects of business that industry executives face every day,” Juckel explained.
“My time in the USC program helped make a lot of stuff make a lot more sense. “One of the most meaningful aspects of the program was that it wasn't just retail people there, but also people from the supply side, which brought a variety of different points of view to discussions,” he said.
As he was getting ready to graduate from the USC program in 2000, “they warned us to take a breath as we reentered the workforce, because we were going to have so many new ideas to bring to our jobs, and they were right — it was tough to pick out just one thing to do at a time,” Juckel said.
“It involved how we looked at people, how we used technology, how we thought about management. One of the things I did was to hold classes in the store to teach the subordinate managers about the things I'd learned.”
Among the results of his training, Juckel said, are low turnover rates and very high productivity.
When he came back to Haggen, Juckel was named manager of the chain's highest-volume unit, then was moved among the stores in need of a turnaround. He subsequently became a district manager and more recently was named general manager of the chain's four Oregon stores, which operate separately from the rest of the chain, Juckel said.
JEFFREY JUCKEL
TITLE: Divisional Manager, Haggen Inc.
EDUCATION: Food Industry Leadership Program, Portland State University; Food Industry Marketing Program, University of Southern California
