Employees tend to stick with companies that help them grow, said Jason Harris, a category director at Save-A-Lot.
When Harris started with Save-A-Lot six years ago as a senior procurement buyer, he signed up for the mentorship program. The company matched him with the former president and CEO Bill Shaner, who worked under the company’s founder Bill Moran for many years.
“He gave me insights that I use in both my personal and professional life,” Harris said. “That says a lot about Save-A-Lot, that it would give me a mentor of such high caliber. It’s one of many great things that Save-A-Lot has in place to push diversity.”
Now Harris is a category director for the company’s 1,200 stores, which are primarily located in the Midwest, Mississippi, the East Coast and Texas. Harris also sits on the company’s Diversity Council, a committee initiated in 2005 to makes retaining the company’s diverse talent a business imperative.
Before joining Save-A-Lot, Harris served as an associate category manager for convenience stores at Speedway Super America in Ohio. As a transplant, Harris said St. Louis region has been quite welcoming. Harris participated in the St. Louis Diversity Initiative, a program that brings together diverse middle-management professionals from companies across the city for leadership development.
“It was a life-changing experience,” he said. “It says a lot about our company that it would send people from underrepresented groups to things like that.”
Harris said he’s impressed with the number of initiatives St. Louis has to try to retain top diverse talent and recruit younger minority professionals.
“These initiatives will enable St. Louis to be a powerhouse in retaining affluent, educated minorities,” he said. “Some of the initiatives are unheard of in other parts of the country.”
However, the public would be hard pressed to find out if Save-A-Lot’s retention efforts are working. When asked about the percentage of underrepresented groups in upper management, Harris said, “That information is internal data that is not released to the public.”
Browsing the company’s management team on the Save-A-Lot website, there are no African Americans or other minorities in the company’s top eight leaders, of whom two are women.
Serving the needs of its diverse consumer base is certainly one of the company’s goals. Harris performs analytical research into what consumers want and where their competition stands on certain products. With that research, Harris is able to better increase the stores’ customer diversity.
“We make sure we have the right assortment for different ethnic groups,” he said. “We want to be mindful of the demographic and what they are consuming.”
The company also wants more diversity in its store owners, or licensees, and the Diversity Council has a team working on recruitment for that.
In his MBA program at the University of Toledo, Harris said he spent a lot of time preparing analytical consumer reports. Yet what hands-on experience has taught him is the art of vendor negotiations.
“It’s a game of wit, the banter back and forth,” he said. “We’ll eventually meet in the middle. It’s good for business to have the back in forth. And it’s exciting to me.”
Harris also makes sure that small and minority business owners get a foot in the door. The company tries to use diverse vendors for the goods on the shelves. However, the company does not have stated minority participation goals for minority or women-owned supplier businesses.
“We get them in touch with category managers to make contact,” he said. “A lot of time, because they are smaller entities, they might need help understanding the supply chain. We spend more time explaining intricacies of the process. At the end of the day, we want to be at the lowest cost and best value.”
Often times the stores are built in underserved areas, so the company tries to attract minority contractors and workers to participate on those jobs.
“One-quarter of our customer base is African-American, and it makes sense that when we are building developments we use in contractors that are minorities,” he said. “It is a big focus.”
