13 February 2013, a visit to your local Pocatello, Idaho, WinCo grocery store will reveal shelves that are fast becoming bare.  All orders for Store number 5 have been stopped, the store will cease operations sometime in March.

The Pocatello store was the fifth store to open in Idaho, after Ralph Ward and Bud Williams started the grocery operation back in 1967.  Various stores were called Waremart Food Centers, or Cub Foods until 1999.

The official WinCo web site says the current name stands for Winning Company, but I swear I remember being told, by WinCo employees I knew during the name change, that WinCo was the creation of a school kid who won a contest for coming up with the new name. Supposedly WinCo actually stands for the U.S. states that the grocery chain operated in at that time: Washington, Idaho, Nevada, California and Oregon.

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In 1985 the employees of the company became majority owners in the business.

Since the name change WinCo has been expanding.  That expansion has picked up pace ever since the downfall of competitor Albertsons (once a Idaho based grocery store chain, but not anymore).

Since 2006 Albertsons has been passed around to several new owners (despite the website making it look like it’s still owned by the Albertsons family):  A Minnesota based company called Supervalue, an affiliate of evil Cerberus Capital Management called AB Acquisition, and CVS.  Finally in January 2013 evil Cerberus Capital Management became sole owner (I wouldn’t be surprised if they liquidate).

According to Albertsons’ website they are down to 450 stores across the country (WinCo has a ways to go, with only 85 stores and 14,000+ employees).  But employee owned WinCo is exploding.  In the past ten years they’ve built a giant distribution center south of Boise, added new stores and another distribution center in California, and expanded into Utah. Now Pocatello will get what many loyal WinCo shoppers have been demanding, a giant new WinCo.

But wait, there’s more.  WinCo has announced a new store for Bellingham, Washington, in the Old Joe’s Sporting Goods building (at a cost of $7 million).  WinCo just spent $5.1 million buying land in Gilbert, Arizona. The property is currently a car dealership, but will become WinCo’s fourth store in the Grand Canyon State.

There are some concerns for WinCo, like a lawsuit in Vallejo, California, which is trying to stop the building of a new store based on environmental reasons.  Also, some of WinCo’s new HQ management jumped over from the sinking ship known as Alberstons, which causes many WinCo employees to worry.

I’ve known some WinCo employees who had a tough time dealing with WinCo’s employee policies (which are very strict compared to publicly held companies), but it’s hard to challenge those policies since they are supposedly approved by fellow employees.

Also in California, a mom and pop grocery store in Merced is shutting down, they blame Walmart and WinCo: “Things are changing in the industry. It’s getting harder and harder every year to compete, especially family-owned types of businesses such as ours.”-Gary Lowe, General Manager

In today’s economy an employee owned company is as close as you can get to a family owned operation, and there’s less of a chance the company will be sold off just for the value of its assets (like Sears and Kmart), so my money’s on WinCo (too bad you can’t buy stock in privately held WinCo, lucky employees, and besides I don’t really have any money to invest).

Pocatello’s new WinCo store number 117 was built on the Old Fred Meyer building site (aka Alameda Plaza) right next to a former Albertsons (on the land I used to do property management, for JP Reality who then sold out to General Growth Properties).  Number 117 is at least twice as big as the Old Fred Meyer building.

The New Fred Meyer building is located where the Old Pocatello Mall used to be.  So now Store number 5 will be called the Old WinCo, and the Old Fred Meyer will now be called the New WinCo, and everyone will forget there was an Old Fred Meyer just like they’ve forgotten about the Old Pocatello Mall.

That’s progress!