When he was 15 years old, Randy Robinson got a job bagging groceries in the Zehrs grocery store in his hometown of Goderich. Little did he know then that 40 years later he would still be with the same company – Loblaws – albeit as owner of a store.
“I was headed for university and got offered a full-time job at Zehrs in Wingham to run the night shift, so I thought I would work for a year before I went back to school,” says Randy. “From there, every time I wanted to go back to school they kept offering to promote me.”
He next became grocery manager and later store manager at a Zehrs in Strathroy, then he was sent to Zehrs in Orillia as a young, single store manager to turn around the failed location. “I guess I did pretty good because after three years they asked me to come to head office and run retail pricing for the entire company.”
From there, a one-and-a-half-year stint at the Loblaws head office in Toronto convinced him that the city lifestyle wasn’t for him. By then he was married and had two small children, and decided it was time to get back to store level. When he saw the franchise for Huntsville come up, he thought “that would be a great place to run a store and get out of the city.”
His wife, Tracy, wasn’t so easily convinced. “She said, ‘not a chance, it’s too far from Kitchener, she wouldn’t live this far away.’ I said okay, but then I said we should look again so I brought her up again, and she still said it was too far away.” Eventually he wore her down and with her blessing they arrived in Huntsville in 1996.
Huntsville is now definitely home for the Robinson family. When they moved to their new location in 2002, Randy offered to take up his old head-office job again and says that Tracy replied, ‘are you kidding? Huntsville’s my home. Our kids have been raised here. We’re never leaving.”
Randy acknowledges that being with the same company for 40 years is a bit unusual these days and not something his kids are likely to do. “People do it, but I really don’t think it will happen with the next generation. They’ve got too much going on, they’re too mobile. So it’s kind of neat for me to have done it all with one organization.”
And after 40 years, retirement isn’t too far off. “We’d like to retire sooner rather than later. What does that mean? In the next few years, but we’ll see. That retirement will be staying in Huntsville, being part of the great volunteer community we have here. We have no plans to leave, we’ll just keep ourselves busy doing something else in Huntsville.”
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Janet Boston says
Always happy to buy my groceries here. Excellent staff and huge community supporters.