Fareway Stores, Inc.

Fareway Stores, Inc.

Executive Summary:

Fareway is a chain of grocery stores that stretch throughout the state of Iowa branching into the states of Nebraska and Minnesota. Fareway was started back in 1938, and have grown into a strong chain that value’s serving their customers with the upmost respect while listening to their suggestions to make their stores a better place to shop. “We hold family values in the highest regard, demonstrating integrity, fairness and honesty in our relationships with customers, employees, vendors and suppliers” (Fareway, 2012). Fareway has many plans for its future and one of those plans is to break into different markets and to open a few new stores this year in select cities. Fareway is always trying to enter markets of every kind and working towards bringing people together to make a family will get through tough times.

Their culture has really been the same since the beginning but they are starting to realize that training is the key to making everyone happy like Paul S. Beckwith envisioned when he started Fareway back in 1938. Fareway is one of the largest employers in Iowa, hiring young men and women and giving them work experience that will last them the rest of their lives but the biggest value they have is giving their employees understanding and respecting everyone that they work with. This brings me to what Fareway is trying to change and that is the culture of their business. This is very hard to do when the company has 8500 people working for them and when their main form of trying is mentoring (Beckwith, 2012).

Mission Statement:

Fareway has been working to provide some of the highest quality food and something they strive for is “Providing fresh, high quality meat and produce” (Fareway, 2012). With technology consistently advancing and coming up with new ways to store most can and box goods, making sure that your produce and meat departments are just as fresh is very important. People go to the store to buy food that is good for them and their children. Making sure that produce and meats are of the highest quality really brings people back to the store no matter where they are from. Talking to their customers really make a difference because being able to see and hear what other people think about how the store is doing gives perspective on the mindset of the store. It is also a way of making sure they are keeping up to their values.

Needs Assessment:

Fareway has had a lot of success when it comes to profit even in these hard times but as you walk through the stores, they are at different levels of mentality when it comes to wanted to work. The stores that have a poor mentality when it comes to work ethic means that the manager worked hard to get to his position but isn’t using his knowledge or experience