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Remembering Ed Jennerby
Nate Horwitz Ed Jenner, a former general
manager of the
Honest Weight Food Coop, died on Friday, April 7 after a brief illness.
He was
72. Ed joined the Coop at the very end of February 2000. As a member
worker, he
worked doing outreach and grocery stocking, and as a courtesy clerk. Ed
quickly
rose through the ranks of the Coop, getting elected to the Board on May
7 of
that year. At that time, the Coop was being managed by a staff council,
which
was viewed as a temporary situation until the Coop was able to hire a
new
general manager. One of Ed’s duties on the Board was to head the
general manager
search team. In July of 2000, the
staff council
resigned and the Board appointed Ed as the interim general manager. Ed
applied
for the permanent position and was hired for that job in December 2000. Ed stayed on as general
manager for
another year and a half. It was a profitable but tumultuous time in the
Coop’s
history. Sales rose about 20% during Ed’s tenure, but we went through
three
different point-of-sale systems and faced lawsuits from two employees.
We also
were short of a full Board for most of Ed’s time as general manager.
Although
Honest Weight had been advertising for several years before Ed’s
arrival, he pushed
it much more aggressively than it had been previously, creating our
first
television ad and increasing advertising expenditures more 300% during
his
tenure. He also hired a part-time outreach supervisor. Ed extended Honest
Weight’s hours,
got us more involved with the Cooperative Grocers Association of the
Northeast
and the Cooperative Advantage Program. And it was during his time as
general
manager that “Senior Tuesday” was started here. Ed spent a great deal of
time
working on a reset plan for the Coop. This plan was supposed to have
been voted
on at the January 2002 budget meeting, but the members voted to table
the issue
until the April meeting, as the plan seemed to need more fleshing out.
The
April meeting also featured a vote for four Board members. It was one
of the
most hotly contested elections in Coop history, with twelve candidates
vying
for four seats. Since some candidates were viewed as pro-Ed or anti-Ed,
the election
was widely viewed as a referendum on Ed himself. As it turns out, all
of the
candidates perceived, whether fairly or unfairly, as Ed’s candidates
lost, as
did Ed’s reset plan. Ed announced that he would be resigning shortly
after
this, followed closely by the resignation of three Board members. |
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