When I was in high school and college, I worked part-time at a popular grocery store in the Northeast called Wegmans. Those of you who are from the Northeast, or who have visited, will be very familiar with Wegmans. It has been named one of the 100 Best Companies to work for by Fortune magazine every single year since the first list in 1998. This year, a Nielsen poll ranked Wegmans the firm with the best corporate reputation, unseating Amazon. My parents shopped at Wegmans my entire life and I always had one close to me. It wasn’t until I went to college that I realized that Wegmans wasn’t a typical grocery store. My friends from out of state would drop their stuff at their dorm and immediately head to Wegmans like it was Disney Land or something. Buzzfeed started writing breathless articles about it with titles like "25 Reasons Wegmans is the Greatest Supermarket the World Will Ever Know" and "21 Reasons You Should Join the Wegmans Cult." To me, even after having shopped there and worked there, it was a nice grocery store. But for people who didn’t always have it available at a moment’s notice, it might as well have been El Dorado. After I graduated college, I started writing for The MHEDA Journal. I had no real-world business experience. I assumed that for a business to be successful, it had to have the best products or the lowest prices. Preferably both. What I learned very quickly, however, is that what customers value even more than the brand or the price is the feeling of trust that MHEDA members instill. Our members are more than just order takers. They are genuine partners with both the end-user and their suppliers and from those partnerships spring the kind […]