Walking into the family-owned Piedmont Grocery, folded into a corner of the always buzzing strip of Oakland that is Piedmont Avenue, one feels at home, whether looking for old supermarket favorites like canned soups and soda or eyeing the wide selection of hot foods. Wherever I turned on my visit, I was invariably met with a smile from staff—even before they knew I was there to shine a light on Piedmont Grocery Co. vice president Amy Pence.
Pence does not readily accept the spotlight. When I first called to tell her she was going to be profiled as a “Woman in Business” for East Bay Magazine, she laughed right into the receiver. And when we sat down together in the back office as meticulously ordered as the perfectly faced shelves downstairs, she started by saying this was “not her comfort zone.”
It’s About the People, Inside and Out
I told her about the smiles that greeted me wherever I wandered in the store that her family bought in 1956. It was founded in 1902.
“We’re a union shop,” responded Pence. “Most of our employees have been here 20-plus years. The majority of our employees have been here a very long time.”
The wine and dry foods aisles are immaculate and well labeled; the produce section is an accessible open plan; the meat counter is broad and bright. Much about the grocery recalls an older period of technological advancement, when these freezers and deli slicers, still kept shining today, were new.
“There’s a lot of things that we do that are very old school. I mean, we still use typewriters,” said Pence with a laugh. She noted that, as a child, she would print Snoopy images on the office’s dot matrix printer.
That legacy is part of the successful store which nonetheless needs to adapt to the current century. Previously, Pence worked in online merchandising. From that experience, she has brought contemporary business tools.
“Our customer base from the time I started [25 years ago] to now is totally different,” said Pence. “The neighborhood itself has gotten younger and is not necessarily just looking for the Oscar Meyer Bologna. It’s like, ‘I’m having tinned mussels tonight.’”
The changing demographic’s varied, sometimes capricious, trends are an important part of the market’s revenue mix. The store has to keep up with “the changing palate of the people around us. Everybody’s eating hummus,” noted Pence with a laugh. “Korean is huge right now. We didn’t have daikon before.”
On the other hand, this market has offered supermarket standards to generations.
“We’ve got the senior home over there. So they’re looking for stuff my generation and younger are not eating. They want the Jell-O,” said Pence. “You have to strike a balance.”
As the store is local and family-run, this allows for merchandising agility in support of smaller vendors. “Being independent, we can make our own decisions,” stated Pence. “We bring in [products] from the little guys because we can take a quantity of six and try it out, whereas the [chain stores] can’t do that.”
Power to the People
“So we are [UFCW] Local 5,” announced Pence. She spoke at length about the importance of providing a living wage whether the economy is going well or not. And she clearly cares about the union mission, recognizing its role in the long-term stability of her family business. It is part of the reason the staff and community feel so close.
“Thanksgiving in the meat department, you have neighbors catching up with neighbors, or the person behind the counter is like, ‘Hey, how’s your son?’ you know. ‘Did he graduate?’ That kind of thing,” Pence told me, smiling. “So it is very much still a neighborhood market for customers that we’ve known for ages, and you don’t get that anywhere else.”
Women in Grocery
“You will notice that the majority of our employees are women,” pointed out Pence. That is a change over the once male-dominated industry. “More often than not, we’re doing the shopping; it makes sense.”
Most shoppers are either women shopping for themselves or households. Both the types of work and the schedule make Piedmont jobs appealing to women, who still so often face a crunch of obligations.
“Women, certainly in the home, are managing a lot of people. We know how to manage, so the grocery industry lends itself to it,” said Pence. Whether bringing home the bread or baking it, women can find what they need at the market. “There’s flexibility. The benefits are great. You can come to work for four hours, and then you go pick up your kids at school.
“I had a ridiculous amount of flexibility with my schedule,” acknowledged Pence, who worked part time while raising three kids with her husband. “No way I could’ve done what I did if I wasn’t working here.”
Drawing wisdom from her own journey as a woman in the industry, Pence now prioritizes that same compassion for her staff. The neighborhood starts at home, which for some is Piedmont Grocery.
Piedmont Grocery, 4038 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, 510.653.8181. Open Mon–Sat 9am–8pm, Sun 9am–7pm; piedmontgroceryoakland.com.
I don’t shop at Piedmont grocery because I can’t afford it. I think their vegetables are extremely high priced. You can get equal or better at Berkeley bowl