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Lunchtime lecture with the authors of ‘We are Market Basket’

Courtesy Photo
This is the cover to Daniel Korschun’s and Grant Welker’s new book about the Market Basket boycott
Taylor Carito
Connector Staff

The summer of 2014 marked the beginning of an unusual but revolutionary response to save a corporation.

Employees, customers and even vendors lined the streets to hear the verdict at the Wyndham Hotel in Andover, Mass. All anxiously awaited to hear the fate of Arthur “Artie” T. Demoulas, Market Basket CEO.

The book, “We Are Market Basket: The Story of the Unlikely Grassroots Movement that Saved a Beloved Business” by Grant Welker and Daniel Korschun, shares personal accounts and facts of thousands of employees who protested to keep their CEO and won.

In a lunchtime lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2015, Welker and Korschun shared how they began their research and witnessed the boycotts.

“It was the underdog story,” said Dr. Scott Latham, Dean of the Manning School of Business, in the opening remarks of the lecture. “No one thought they were going to win.”

Joined by many former employees and customers of the beloved grocery store chain, the two authors discussed how they teamed up to research and write about the protests and the uniqueness of the Market Basket uprising.

It all began in the summer of 2013, when Demoulas lost the majority of shares in the company. As a result, one year later in July, he was fired. Welker, who is also a reporter for The Lowell Sun, was there the day Demoulas was dismissed.

Welker mentioned in the lecture how thousands of employees were at the hotel in Andover, where the meeting was taking place, anxiously awaiting the decision, ready to risk their jobs if the outcome was not in their favor.

At this time, after exploring the many unique and intriguing stories of the Market Basket uprising, Korschun, a business professor at Drexel University, wanted to learn more about this grocery store chain.

The stories he read by Welker inspired him to reach out and collaborate with the reporter to explore deeper into the roots of this unusual and one-of-a-kind phenomenon where employees risked everything to save their CEO.

They both spoke about how Market Basket differed from other grocery stores. For example, there are no self-check outs, so there is more human-to-human interaction, and they do not have a website like other corporations.

“Very few did not start by pushing carts or bagging food,” said Korschunin regards to the unconventionality of the corporation.

“Even decades after they changed the Demoulas stores, people still call it Demoulas,” Welker said. But why is that? Most employees feel like family toward each other, according to Korschun, and they extend that family to loyal customers as well.

They both stated very clearly that the protests would not have been successful without the major support from the customers, who would stand and protest with employees or refuse to shop at Market Basket until Demoulas was back in charge.

In the summer of 2014, after Demoulas was replaced, most of the 25,000 employees at the 70 stores arranged a successful walkout and ignited a customer boycott in efforts to reinstate their former CEO. They were not unionized, which put them at extreme risk to lose their jobs, but they pursued anyways to keep Market Basket in the hands of whom they thought the company belonged.

At the end of the event, Welker and Korschun took questions from the audience members, one of whom was a former employee at Market Basket who began his career there in 1951. The grocery store chain first opened its doors in 1917, on Dummer Street in Lowell, Mass. Although the original store is no longer a Market Basket, one of the oldest ones in operation is still located on Fletcher Street in Lowell.