Bernard Kroger

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Bernard Henry Kroger (January 24, 1860-1938) was an American businessman who pioneered the Kroger chain of supermarkets, beginning in 1883.

Early life

Kroger was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, fifth of ten children of German immigrant Johan Heinrich and Mary Gertrude (née Schlebbe) Kroger. In the Kingdom of Hanover, Kroger's father was born. His mother was born in Elve, Westphalia. Kroger's family lived above the dry goods store where his parents owned. Kroger's parents had to leave the failing store due to the 1873 economic recession.

Kroger left school and started working at age thirteen to help his family. He left his first job in a drug store because his Christian mother was opposed to him working on Sundays. He began working as a farmhand near Pleasant Plain, Ohio, for six dollars a month. "I will never forget the first night I spent away from home," Kroger said of the farm work. Despite the fact that I was only fourteen and weighed only one hundred pounds, my job on the farm was that of no man." Kroger resentful of his work, contracted malaria, left early, and walked thirty-seven miles to Cincinnati.

Personal life and family

He married Mary Emily Jansen and had seven children with her, although his oldest son died in 1899. Mary, his wife, died in 1899.

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Grocery career

Kroger began working as a door-to-door salesman for the Great Northern and Pacific Tea Co., eventually ending up at the Imperial Tea Co. The store wasn't doing well, and the two owners named Kroger as a manager. Kroger turned around the struggling supermarket, earning the store a $3,100 (roughly to $84,144 in 2021), the equivalent to $84,144 in 2021). When the owners decided not to make Kroger a partner, he invested his life savings of $372 with a friend, an Irish immigrant B.A. Branagan had borrowed $350, but she had borrowed $350. They opened a grocery store on 66 Pearl Street in downtown Cincinnati together. The unexpected overnight flood of 1884 destroyed the store and the partners opened another.

"B.H." was Kroger's term for the partnership stores. The founders of The Great Western Tea Co., Kroger & Co. Despite numerous pains, the stores thrived. Kroger asked Branagan to buy his stake in the partnership for $1,000 because he needed more control over his operations. Branagan couldn't afford the bid and decided to sell his shares to Kroger for $1,500. Kroger's Cincinnati location opened four new stores soon.

Kroger is credited with the development of the popular low-cost, self-service grocery chain model that continues today. Kroger's innovations include being the first store to individually mark the price of every item on sale, as well as beginning to treat every customer who buys coffee or tea. Kroger's "profit-sharing" scheme, in which his customers were given "proofs of purchase" (receipts), was available in 1902, and after acquiring them, they could "exchange them for all kinds of premiums... crockery ware, glass, granite, tin and enameled ware, rugs, furniture, lamps, and hundreds of other useful and ornamental items."

Kroger was the first grocer to use automobiles as delivery vehicles in 1912. In Cincinnati, Kroger purchased a fleet of 75 Ford Model T's, including 200 horses and delivery wagons. Kroger pioneered merging grocery stores with a bakery, then adding formerly stand-alone meat markets to his retail grocery store design.

Kroger began to advertise heavily in local papers as early as 1895, which he believed contributed to his popularity. Kroger's latest advertisements featured extensive lists of items for purchase by category and also detailed the article. Kroger's advertisements appeared in Cincinnati's various newspapers and often packed entire pages, marking a new marketing effort that was unhearded up to that point.

Kroger wanted economies of scale by purchasing and manufacturing his own private label products, in an attempt to control the cost and quality of the products he sold. Kroger used to pay suppliers cash for their services but gained a price advantage by purchasing bulk products. Kroger pioneered private label manufacturing, which also produced several items himself.

By 1902, he owned a factory that manufactured his own brands of preserved foods, jellies, and extracts. The new factory was designed with enough space to safely transfer the old Kroger cracker production inside the new building in Cincinnati's Pendleton and Hunt streets. Kroger was the first grocer with an internal quality control lab established in 1921 and the first to conduct scientific consumer studies.

Kroger was an expert at utilizing the public's sensitivity to price in promoting the items sold in his stores. Coal prices soared sharply in 1902, but Kroger did not lift prices, saying, "We produce 100,000 loaves (of bread) a week and use between eight and ten tons of coal." Even as coal prices rise to us per loaf, this is not insignificant, but I see no reason for charging our customers more than they are now paying."

Kroger has steadily expanded his market area, expanding to Kentucky with new locations in the 1890s. Kroger's 1902-1902 acquisition program continued, purchasing 14 Dayton, Ohio grocery stores from the Cincinnati Grocery Co. Kroger stores as Missouri in 1912 and 1924. Kroger reached a record of 5,575 stores in 1929.

Kroger in 1899 demanded that all other grocery stores join his drive to limit retail grocery store hours by closing at 7:00 p.m. He said he understood "the right of working people to have their evenings to themselves" after 6:00 p.m. so "they have a chance to get their groceries" in the remaining hour.

Kroger's success in 1904 enabled him to include his business in a $1,000,000 (equivalent to $30,159,259 in 2021) stock auction. He sold 4,000 preferred shares at $110 per share to public investors with a pledged 5.45% interest payable quarterly. He retained the remaining 6,000 shares for himself and announced that they would never be sold. "This company takes over the entire B. H. Kroger market, which has been immensely profitable" the company's profits were oversubscribed, including the cracker and cake baker, the bread baking plant, and the warehouse," the million dollar stock offering was oversubscribed with $1,067,000 invested by 215 new stockholders.

Kroger renamed "Kroger Grocery & Baking Co." The company's name was changed to "Kroger" later in the company's history.

Kroger was the first supermarket retailer to sell fresh meat in the United States. Kroger acquired the Shapell, Nagel & Co. meat packing firm in 1904: Kroger's acquisition in Camp Washington, a suburb of Cincinnati, gave them 11 new grocery stores and stands as well as meat slaughtering, butchering, and refrigeration operations that spanned "several acres." Customer interest was ignited by Kroger's new plan of including a convenient fresh meat section in his grocery stores. Kroger was able to increase and fine-tune customer traffic by restricting certain cuts of meat on certain days of the week. For example, 1905 advertisements announced, "We will sell... loin steaks, chuck roasts... and sugar-cured, smoked shoulders"; "on Saturday only."

Customers were able to call their nearest Kroger grocery store and place orders that would be "filled as carefully as if given in person" by 1905. If homeowners provided their phone number, Kroger advertising told them, "we would delight in calling you up every morning for your order."

Kroger bought the Great China Tea Company and the Schneider Grocery and Baking Company in 1908. He started a second wave of capital increase, valuing the company at $2,500,000 (equivalent to $75,398,148 in 2021). Kroger sold the public 6,000 shares at a $100 per share price with a pledged 7% interest to be paid quarterly. The shares were deemed as "liens, dollar for dollar, against actual inventory assets," according to the authors. Kroger Grocery & Baking Co. was reported to be "fully debt-free" and that the company paid "cash for everything it buys and sells for cash only." Kroger had 96 stores for a total of 136 stores in the United States and boasted that the company's "warehouse, bakery, preservation, and candy factory" was the country's biggest of its kind.

Kroger had acquired and opened over 5,500 stores by the 1920s. Kroger sold the business in December 1927 (roughly to $436,789,272 in 2021) to a Lehman Brothers-led Wall Street banking syndicate. On January 31, 1928, he resigned as president of the Kroger Co. In 1931, Kroger resigned from the company's board of directors.

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