Michael Rivera is a 47 year old man whose job is to be the co-manager of a new up and coming grocery store in the Chicago land area. He was born in Los Angeles, California area. Started work in the food business in ’88 with Hansen Juices. After Hansen he went to Odwalla. Odwalla is a juice company that sells high quality drinks; they sell to retell communion stores around the Los Angeles area. After 14 years of retell beverage he moved to Illinois to help with the expansion with the Kroger owned food division. It took 5 years to make co-manager for the Burbank store on Cicero Ave. After 16 months he is on the verge of becoming manager of his own store.
What do you do for a living? What is it like?
I’m in the control of the merchandising for the store. We operate a 70,000 sq ft grocery store that generates 8000,000 dollars a week. Our main function is that planning and ordering of goods for the store. We operate on a weekly sales planner.

What is a weekly sales planner?

It’s the current items that are on sale and displayed throughout the store. The planner goes from Wednesday to Tuesday as the display items change on a week to week basis.

How long have you had your job? How would you describe it?
16 months. It’s challenging I guess, because things change on a weekly basis it becomes repetitive except that the items change and making sure you have the right amount. I’m on my third store in 16 months. The one thing I don’t like is when you get the store the way you like it then you get reassigned to a struggling store.

What has been the hardest store to rebuild?
787-Hamond, Indiana. That store went through a re-merch and remodel.


What is a re-merch and remodel?
Re-model is when we got new equipment such as new shelving and freezers for the store. It was quite a bit of a facelift because of all of the new items coming in. Remerch was to completely re-merchandised the food coming to the store. Since all of the new shelves and such they had to completely reorganize how the items were shelved. While also increasing good sellers capacity in the store and lessening the size of bad or slower sellers.