Their entrepreneurial adventure had a somewhat rocky beginning, however. Ralph Ketner resigned in 1957 and opened a grocery store with two men who had also worked for Glenn Ketner and had then gone on to work for Winn-Dixie: his brother, Brown, and shared friend, Wilson Smith.
Although he struggled mightily with Nescafe to get the allowance, the Salisbury resident eventually won the debate and established a precedent for other grocery companies that is, grocery stores could still receive the usual discount, for instance, on the value of a 10,000 item order, no matter if a company decided to give customers a discount and lower the total price of the entire order.Īfter Glenn Ketner merged his ten stores with John Milner’s fifteen Piggly-Wiggly stores in 1955, Ralph Ketner enjoyed thinking about the possibilities that the Ketner-Milner merger offered in fact, his brother seemed “poised to dominate the grocery business in North Carolina,” but Glenn soon sold his operation to Winn-Dixie. While working as a buyer for Excel Grocery (Glenn Ketner’s stores) Ketner displayed business savvy and became the first buyer to ask for cash discount on gross amount of the shipment.
After the war, an indecisive Ketner returned to North Carolina and worked nine jobs, including positions as an IRS agent, as a buyer for his brother’s grocery stores, and as a buyer for Winn-Dixie, before embarking on an entrepreneurial career as president of Food Town. In particular, while in the 302nd Ordinance Battalion in Casablanca, Morocco, Ketner created an inventory form that allowed one man to do the job of five. While serving in Africa and Italy, the innovative Ketner found ways to cut costs and eliminate bureaucratic inefficiencies in the United States Army. When World War II came, Ketner answered the call in 1942 to defend America. After Tri-State, Ketner returned to North Carolina and worked in various jobs, including for his brother, Glenn, at Ketner Gocery in the accounts payable department at Cannon Mills and as an auditor at Cabarrus Bank (also owned by Cannon Mills). Yet Ketner never graduated, for a fear of public-speaking prevented him from taking required speech courses. When he enrolled in 1937 as an accounting major at Tri-State College in Angola, Indiana, he seemed on the right path. Such childhood troubles and work experiences undoubtedly helped to develop a hardiness and creativity that benefited Ralph Ketner when pioneering the “cutting-cost” concept as Food Town president.īut as a young man and professional, Ketner went through an interregnum marked with indecision. All seemed stable once again until 1932, when eleven-year-old Ralph’s father died. At nine, Ralph started working in the grocery business, delivering meat orders on his bicycle for his father. Bob Ketner remarried in 1928 and young Ralph now had a step-mother: Allene Glover.
At the age of five during the winter of 1926, he battled pneumonia and barely survived his mother was less fortunate.
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In 1923, the Ketner family moved to Salisbury, North Carolina, where Ralph Ketner’s father, formerly a farmer, started a butcher shop and provided his six children an example of entrepreneurship and innovation that displayed how to make a profit without cheating people. Ketner was born on Septemin Rimertown in Rowan County. Son of George Robert (Bob) Ketner and Effie Yost Ketner, Ralph W. These early experiences, combined with an innovation and lifelong desire to cut costs, helped Ralph Ketner revolutionize the grocery industry and make a one-store operation in Salisbury into a leading, national supermarket chain. Co-founder of Food Town (later renamed Food Lion), Ralph Ketner started working in the grocery business as a child in his father’s meat store in Salisbury, North Carolina and later as a teenager during the Depression in his brother’s Kannapolis, North Carolina store.
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