Disclosure: We arrived in Des Moines, Iowa, a few days ago. Meda is here to make several presentations to judges and other court personnel, and I’m along as her escort. So far, it’s the land of thunderstorms and rising rivers.

After landing, we went looking for the nearest grocery store to pick up some supplies, and found a Hy-Vee store just a few minutes away. I don’t think I’ve run into a Hy-Vee before.

This was a very large store, now undergoing renovations. Prices very cheap by Hawaii standards. After our second shopping visit, I started wondering about the company and its reputation, since I avoid shopping at Walmart-like stores. Knowing nothing about Hy-Vee, I went looking for information. And what I found was surprising to me.

Turns out Hy-Vee, which was started during the depression, now ranks among the top 25 supermarket chains with 75,000 employees, $8.7 billion in annual sales, is ranked among the country’s largest privately-owned companies, and most importantly, since 1960 has been an employee owned business!

With sales of $8.7 billion annually, Hy-Vee ranks among the top 25 supermarket chains and the top 50 private companies in the United States. Its more than 235 stores are located in eight Midwestern states: Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Distribution centers are in Chariton, Iowa, and Cherokee, Iowa, with a third perishable operation in Ankeny, Iowa. Hy-Vee’s corporate office is located in West Des Moines, Iowa.

According to the company history:

The Employees’ Trust Fund was established in 1960, enabling all eligible employees to share in the ownership of the company. It was the beginning of the company’s long and proud tradition of being known as an employee-owned business.

From an article in Supermarket News:

Partners Charles Hyde and David Vredenburg — the “Hy” and the “Vee” in Hy-Vee — opened their first store together in 1930 in Beaconsville, Iowa, and from very early on established the principle of store-level autonomy that still guides the chain today.

As the chain began to expand, it began paying store managers on a profit-sharing basis in 1933, according to a history on the company’s website. Store managers met at one of the stores to discuss store operations and plan their advertising, and managers were given the freedom to alter their ads.

Hyde and Vredenburg, together with 14 other partners, rolled up a network of 15 grocery-store locations in Iowa and Missouri in 1938 that formed the nucleus of the chain. Then in 1945, the company purchased a wholesale grocery business in Chariton, Iowa, where it established a headquarters and where it still operates a distribution center.

The company formed the Employees’ Trust Fund in 1960, allowing workers to take ownership in Hy-Vee, which remains employee-owned.

Employee owned. There’s a concept!

Here’s a list of the top 100 majority employee-owned companies in the country.

For some reason, Hy-Vee is not included. If it were, it appears that it would be the #2 on the list in terms of the number of employees.

But it’s not all a rosy picture.

Searching for more details, I found this online comment posted about a year ago, part of a debate over Hy-Vee’s potential entry into the Minneapolis area.

Hy-Vee is an employee owned company–employees collectively own over fifty percent of the stock. However, it is non-union, with wage scales more similar to Wal-Mart and Target than to the unionized Cub, Rainbow, and Lunds stores–which are about fifty percent higher for full time employees.

So now I’m sort of back to square one, wondering how to evaluate the Hy-Vee chain.

If employees in the employee-owned chain have more control of their working conditions, and aren’t required to chase the profits demanded by Wall Street, I can see accepting the trade-off of lower wages.

But how to drill down to find this kind of data? I’m not sure, especially in the short time that we’ll be here.