Honoring Grocery Store Workers

Amid absorbing the strains on the supply chain and operations, the complexity of complying with a panoply of shifting federal state and local safety recommendations and the ridiculousness of the debate over the consumer’s willingness to comply with them, all the while adjusting for changes in the economic picture and shopping habits and wrestling with the questions of when to implement pay raises, and when and if to retract them, it’s easy to overlook that this has all been triggered by a virus that can and does kill.

Of the more than 140,000 Americans who, as of when the August/September WGB print issue went to press, have died from the coronavirus, no small number were colleagues and counterparts in the supermarket and food industries. How many? That’s hard to tell. The industry has been reluctant to say. The United Food and Commercial Workers keeps a running tab, but mainly on its members.

The lives lost to COVID-19 is a story no one has been entirely comfortable telling, but it reaches the young and old, sick and well, entry-level greeters, wealthy bosses and middle managers, meat cutters and meat processors, deli workers and cashiers. In the pages ahead, WGB tells the stories of just a few of them, starting with Steve Ravitz, the recently retired leader of Ravitz Family Markets.

Related:A Dedication to Serving Others

Photograph courtesy of Ravitz Family Markets

‘His Hobby Was People’

Steve Ravitz, an affable son and grandson of a grocer who brought his own kids into a thriving business known for innovation, customer service and community support, was 73 when he passed away of coronavirus complications in a Philadelphia hospital in early April.

He had fed South Jersey for more than 50 years.

Steve had recently retired as the leader of Ravitz Family Markets, passing on its five ShopRite stores and one PriceRite location in the Burlington and Camden counties of New Jersey to three of his sons. His loss was a devastating blow to generations of shoppers, employees and family who’d come to know him through his company’s local stores and community support; regionally through his frequent appearances on Philadelphia-area TV; and in the trade, where friends and colleagues knew Steve as a warm and enthusiastic grocer, as well as a champion of fellow members of Wakefern Food Corp., the formidable ShopRite stores cooperative. Countless others encountered him as friendly stranger holding court at restaurants in Center City Philadelphia, where he’d retired, and in Margate, N.J., where he spent many summers.

“Steve was a really dynamic industry leader, but also a really constructive collaborator within the complex idiosyncrasies of the individual dynamics of the Wakefern cooperative owners,” says Burt P. Flickinger III, who had known Steve for years through Flickinger’s Strategic Resource Group business. “Wakefern likes to call itself a ‘symphony of soloists,’ ” Flickinger added, describing the 50-plus independent family owners of the cooperative. “Steve [was] a real maestro in getting those soloists to play the proverbial symphony. He always did what’s best for the Wakefern cooperative, even if it wasn’t the best for Steve Ravitz.”

Faith in his family, and in the collective strength of the co-op, allowed Steve in recent years to walk away from the

grocery business and enjoy an easygoing retirement that mirrored his even-tempered and personable reign at the head of the company, which endured more than its share of tumultuous moments over the years but was always there for the community.

“It had never been hard for him over the years to delegate and let go, and let us all learn from our mistakes,” says Jason Ravitz, 48, the oldest of Steve’s kids who today runs the business with his younger brothers Shawn and Brett. Steve’s brother, Ron, who also helped lead the business, is in semiretirement.

“My father was a regular guy. Both in Margate and in Center City, he liked to hit the local restaurants, get a good seat by the bar, and talk to people,” Jason says in an interview. “He liked socializing. Someone would pull up a chair, and he was all ears, inquisitive, and if what they had to say piqued his interest, he’d talk to them. If not, he had his friends who worked at these places. Judging from the outreach after he passed away, we know he touched a lot of those people, more than I ever knew.”

Steve could talk all night about sports—he was a fanatical Philadelphia Eagles and Sixers supporter—but his interest was just as strong in hearing about what motivated people to be successful, taking special interest in entrepreneurs he’d often help in small ways, Jason says. “He loved going to Eagles games but if was too cold, he’d leave at halftime, go to Del Frisco’s, catch the second half there and talk to people.”

“That was his thing,” he says. “He wanted to learn about people. He didn’t necessarily have a hobby. He didn’t play golf. I think his hobby was people.”

These “people skills” served Steve and the communities where he did business very well over a career that began working alongside his demanding father Stanley, whom Jason described as an “old school” North Philadelphia shopkeeper. Stanley’s stores, which were then associated with the Unity Frankford cooperative and its Shop ’n Bag banner, had grown from a business founded by his father, a Russian immigrant to Philadelphia. The Ravitz’s business moved across the Delaware River to the Cherry Hill, N.J., community in the late 1960s, reportedly after Stanley was held up a knifepoint in turbulent North Philadelphia. In the early 1980s, with the Unity co-op struggling, and with kids nearing the age at which they could begin working in the industry, Steve convinced Stanley to abandon Unity for the Wakefern co-op.

“That was a career-making decision that really helped him bridge the generations,” Jason says. “That ended up being a very prophetic move because it saved the family business.” Steve wound up serving as an officer and enthusiastic supporter of the co-op for many years, forming deep and lasting relationships with some of the co-op’s other entrepreneurial patriarchs, such as Dominick Romano and Jimmy Sumas. Even after he retired, Jason says, Steve continued to attend Wakefern board meetings, if only to enjoy the camaraderie of his counterparts.

Jason—who like his dad, learned much of the grocery business at the elbow of his grandfather and is raising his own kids now—says he recognizes today the combination of pressure and ambiguousness his father must have felt transitioning the business. Though his dad’s gentle attempts to steer Jason away from the grocery business were ultimately fruitless (“I had the bug,” Jason confesses), Jason believes his dad’s personable management style was crafted in part to demonstrate there was a different way to do business than his own father had. Jason confesses to recognizing much of his excitable grandfather in his own demeanor (the same of his youngest brother Brett; Shawn, 46, is the calmest of the three current leaders, he says). In times of crisis—like the combination of pandemic chaos and social unrest that accompanied his father’s passing this year—Jason gives plenty of thought to how Steve would have handled it.

“He was a good crisis manager. He was calm,” Jason says of his father. “I can hear him saying, ‘Slow down. Slow down. Take a deep breath.’ … The interpersonal relationship part of [management] was probably the most important thing to him that he passed onto us: Being accessible to our associates and managers, having an open-door policy, being visible in the stores. Remembering you’re not better than anybody else. And no matter what the situation is, no one gets stressed out in public.”

It was Steve’s demeanor that ultimately got Ravitz Family Markets through other periods of difficulty, Jason says. A 52-day strike by union workers in 2001—called shortly before the 9/11 attacks that year— brought personal, emotional and business anguish together. Before the dispute was settled, Steve’s father Stanley had passed away.  “It was horrible,” Jason recalls. “But my father was able to rehabilitate the company and its people, and build the company back from scratch.” Opening three stores in a single day in 2007—the result of a local takeover of former Stop & Shop stores—was another chaotic moment where Steve’s steady leadership was a lifesaver.

Jason recalls these stories when asked about the ways he’s helped to lead the company through the current crises. He advises his fellow grocers to take cleanliness extremely seriously—“don’t go 100% or 110%, go 500%,” he says.

In the height of the shelter-in-place orders and widespread anxieties among shoppers, Ravitz Family Markets kept social media channels updated constantly with information on stock conditions at stores, but also, videos of its employees dancing and having fun as a message to shoppers that stores were safe amid fear and panic buying.

Steve was also a big fan of fun in stores—and he could laugh at the industry too. This made his stores a go-to set for popular Philadelphia TV news reporter Don Polec, whose pieces celebrated off-kilter stories. One Polec piece shot at a Ravitz store focused on “choice fatigue”—the seeming absurdity of the overwhelming selection in grocery stores. Other retailers might have kicked the crew out or felt defensive, but Steve on the report gives a knowing smile and proudly relates “We figure we carry about 125,000 different items here.” Another Polec report visited a Ravitz ShopRite as it hosted a Valentine’s Day produce-aisle wedding given away in a drawing—a promotion Steve had cooked up himself.

Successes liked these helped to provide not only for the Ravitz family but for the communities they were in. Through entities such as the Ravitz Family Foundation, Steve endowed a charitable fund in his parent’s names at his synagogue, and was tickled to have also been honored for his philanthropy by Catholic charities. He supported area outposts of organizations like JDRF, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and Jefferson University Hospital, where he had a board seat.

These organizations and others participated in an outpouring of grief upon learning that he’d become a victim of the COVID-19 pandemic. His son Jason is still processing it all. He believes his dad was probably infected through the crowds packing Philadelphia for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, just prior to a shelter-in-place initiative he feels came too late to the city. Steve was hospitalized for 13 days before passing away, a period Jason describes with palpable anguish and helplessness: The business his father had built was under incredible stress and cried out for his steady guidance, but he lay dying on a respirator, with his family unable to visit him.

Today, Jason is determined not to let the industry forget him—or for people to underestimate the danger of the condition that took his father’s life.

“I have this sense that in some crazy way, he kind of stood in front of the bus to save other people,” Jason says. “But the problem is we have such a short memory in this country, and we’re so easily distracted. I keep telling people, the way this feels is that the world has moved forward, and I’m still stuck dealing with this. And I just hope people remember that this can happen to anyone, and it will happen to more people.”