WinCo Has a Plan for SoCal Market Share

At WinCo, customers bag their own groceries. There are no butchers or bakers. And credit cards aren't accepted.

If you're a shopper, you might view those as shortcomings. If you're an employee, you might consider them benefits.

WinCo Foods Inc., an employee-owned discount warehouse chain with 47 jumbo-sized supermarkets in five Western states, claims it has figured out how to compete with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on prices and with nearly all players in the grocery business on wages.

WinCo -- which opened a store last fall in Temecula, its first in Southern California -- pays a new hire $8.99 an hour, whereas starting pay is $8.90 for a United Food and Commercial Workers union member in Southern California and $8 at a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

What's more, the company boasts, WinCo employees are eligible for a potentially rich pension plan.

"I've never heard of a clerk retiring with a million dollars in their pension" from Albertsons, said WinCo spokesman Michael Read, who worked at Albertsons Inc. for 16 years. "That happens here."

With 14 nonunion stores in Central and Northern California, and expansion plans for Southern California, WinCo is drawing attention. The UFCW, in fact, has asked shoppers to boycott the chain.

"We consider any nonunion store a threat," said Phil Tucker, a special projects director for UFCW 1179 in Martinez, Calif. He said WinCo employees had no guaranteed rate of advancement and weren't protected in the workplace.

WinCo veterans don't see it that way, and a lot of them point to the stock ownership plan. Anyone who works at least 1,000 hours a year receives about 15% of his or her gross pay in company stock under the plan, and a worker is vested after five years. After retirement, a pension can be withdrawn in one lump sum or dribbled out over five or 10 years.

Karen Davis, 60, a longtime WinCo meat wrapper in Salem, Ore., plans to retire this fall. If she sells a little more than half her WinCo shares, her financial planner estimates, she'll clear about $5,000 a month -- more than she now earns and far above the $2,000 a month that a UFCW supermarket checker with 30 years on the job receives.

WinCo, Davis said, has "given me everything they promised."

The company got its start more than 35 years ago in Idaho. Headquartered in Boise, it remained a family-owned operation called Waremart until 1985, when squabbling among heirs led to a takeover by William Long, a former Safeway store manager who had been chief executive at Waremart since 1978.