Winn-Dixie Overview

ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT

Amelia: Happy birthday!

Robert: <laugh>. Well, thank you. I would like to tell you that my birthday was October 15th, 1931, and on that day, prohibition was still the law of the land, and Herbert Hoover was president of the United States, so that was quite a long time ago. It was more than 33,000 days. And so I can't remember a lot of those days.

Amelia: <laugh>. Fair enough. Well, we can start off with what was your first job, either chores paid or unpaid, and how young were you?

Robert: My first job was working in the back room of a Winn- Lovett store in San Marco in Jacksonville that I could walk to. And I was trimming produce and taking care of garbage stuff in the back room. And I was, you know, maybe 14 or 15. I was getting paid, but not very much. Mm-hmm.

Amelia: <affirmative>. Yeah. How involved were you as a child with Winn Dixie? Do you have, like, when was the first time you were aware that of it as something that was important to your family?

Robert: Well, when I was born my father was managing stores and then the grandfather, W.M. Davis, who was then running the company,  bought some stores in Tampa. We moved from West Palm Beach to Tampa.

And so I always knew that from the beginning that that was the family business, so.

Amelia: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, Well first of all, what do you think it was like working with family? Was it ever hard to separate like business and personal lives?

Robert: There were, as you know, four brothers and a sister, I was always told that my grandfather in front of the four boys had a group of sticks and he picked up one stick and broke it over his leg and said, this one stick breaks very easily, but he got four sticks and held them together and couldn't break them over his knees and says that, that's how you should stick together.

So the four brothers stayed in the same business their entire lives, which caused a lot of give and take and sibling rivalry and all that, but they overcame all that because the very first objective was to keep the business going and growing.

Amelia: So, how would you say that Winn Dixie kind of responded with and changed with society?

Robert: Until World War ii? Most all stores were neighborhood grocery stores that, were serving a specific area. They normally did not have their own parking or did limited resources and so forth. At the end of World War II in 1945 and after that, because of the GI bill and financing, helping veterans finance homes, there was a great exodus and building of suburbs, and that's when the neighborhood doors converted to the supermarket concept.

And they then sold everything, meat, produce, groceries, some non-foods. And they built specific stores for that with their own parking so that the customers could have a convenient place to park. And that's when the supermarket concept really began, is after World War ii and as a result of the exodus to the suburbs of so many people. Mm-hmm.

Amelia: <affirmative> I read something, about in 1985 there was some apartheid protests, about the supply of some certain products in the grocery store. Do you know anything about that? I couldn't find a lot of information about it.

Robert: I don't specifically remember that, but this was a time of a great deal of civil rights agitation and attempts to get publicity, and so they would target big corporations to get the publicity. So there are lots of incidents like that back in the old times.

I understand that people always sued the railroad or Yeah, <laugh> and they always went after the supermarkets because they could get a lot of press that would help them generate publicity about it, but I don't specifically remember that.

Amelia: That makes sense though.

Robert: Yes. 

Amelia: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Did you have like a favorite or least favorite part of working at Winn Dixie?

Robert: Well, my interest was finance and investments. And after I graduated college and served in the Army, my first job was what they called a field produce buyer. So I went out into the areas where the prototype items were grown and, and purchased for the company.

I was a trainee, of course, I had people showing me how and what to do it, but I went to various markets; Pompano, Florida had a big market. I was sent to Salinas, California for lettuce and that type of items. So my first employment was not in the stores. And then I got pulled into the office, into administrative things.

And then more into the financial end, because J.E. Davis was a very astute financial man and a good investor. And he was sort of my mentor and he gave me all the reading material that came for him. He passed it on to me and I'd highlight in yellow so that he could just go through it very quick.

So he was my mentor and he came up on the financial side of the business and was the financial vice president for a number of years. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.

Amelia: Are there any stories about J.E. or any others that you can recall, about your family? Just anything about them?

Robert: Well, my father A.D. was more of the merchandise. He was interested in running and operating stores and that was less my field of interest. And J.E. was more administrative and financial and logistical, the warehousing and the trucking and so forth. And so it turned out that my father's protege was my cousin Dan, who was interested in the retailing side.

And, I was the protege of J.E. because he was more on the financial side, so there was sort of a <laugh> a swap there, which was good. I mean, it got a lot of the family noise out of the business, the parental noise out of the business.

Amelia: Yeah. I imagine <laugh>. Do you think your life, if Winn Dixie hadn't been a thing, would it have changed a lot? Or what would you have liked to do with your life otherwise?

Robert: All I had seen prior to going to college was the store work. And I didn't particularly enjoy that. And I wasn't really crazy about the grocery business, but J.E. had a very serious talk with me. I was the oldest grandchild and the first male, oldest male grandchild.

And they wanted me to come into the business as I know now. And he asked me what I thought I wanted to do and study in college. And I said I was interested in studying journalism. And he said, well, we want you to come into the family business and, if you do, you would be 10 years ahead of where you would be in any other field. And I thought about that a while and I thought that was a good a, a good trade Yeah. <laugh>. But also in the back of my mind I said, that'll get me out 10 years earlier also.

So I took that as a literal meaning and I, yeah. <laugh> then I really did leave Winn Dixie operation, uh, early. 

Now I know you are interested about the females in the family. None of them ever ended up in the business. It just simply wasn't part of the culture at that time. The female employees were cashiers and office workers and they didn't really start on the retail side until fairly late in the game.

I retired voluntarily at age 65 from being an official employee of Winn Dixie and at that time started and was the first CEO of the Davis Family Office of Winn Dixie, the major investment there. But there were other investments and projects going on, and it was to provide support to the Davis family members.

And it's still going. And then at age 70, I resigned from the Winn Dixie board because there was a policy of age 70 retirement on the board, which was a very progressive thing, I think that J.E. put in the rule. One of our directors was Sam Walton of Walmart, and I had to retire him at age 70.

He wasn't very happy. He went off to build a huge business after that. But I retired him <laugh> from the Winn Dixie board.