A Price Chopper Manager Looks Back on Career
He has the distinction of being the longest-working, tenured store manager in the company’s history
By Tim Bennett
When John Dean took his first job at Price Chopper at the Glens Falls store in 1976 at 16 he had no idea he’d still be in the company four decades later with the distinction of being the longest-working, tenured store manager in the company’s history.
His face may be familiar to many in Central New York because Dean has managed most of the PCs in Syracuse, including the stores on Erie Boulevard, Western Lights and the former one in Hechinger Plaza, as well as stores in Liverpool, Clay, Cortland, Fulton and Cicero — his last store.
“When I started working at Price Chopper as a teenager I liked it because it gave me the funds to buy expensive stereo equipment and go skiing with my friends,” Dean said smiling, a week after he officially retired this year. “I took some college classes in drafting while I worked at Price Chopper part-time, but I was more into the skiing than my studies. When they offered me a full-time job a year later as an assistant produce manager in Schenectady, I jumped on it.”
Dean remembers the early days of ink-stamping the prices on the items, when there were no scanners and the “swinging beef,” which was the term used for the way beef was transported in tractor trailers to the stores — as fully skinned cows on hooks.
“Once at the stores,” Dean said, “the cows would be attached to the store hooks, which were part of a rail system that ran right into the meat room. From there the butchers would cut off slabs and work on the individual pieces. You remember the Rocky movie? Well, it was like that. Me and some other young guys even took turns punching the hanging meat just like Rocky did in the movie.”
Although Dean’s first job at PC was bagging, he quickly earned the respect of the manager and was promoted to clean the meat room.
“Back in the ‘70s, the Department of Labor was pretty lax, so I was allowed to do things they’d never let kids do today, like cleaning the blades on the meat slicing machines,” he said. “But the manager liked my work so much he had me do the same thing at another store in Glens Falls. I then worked in Schenectady and Clifton Park for about four years until I was sent, along with 15 other workers, to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where they were opening new stores at former A&P locations. I was promoted to department manager of produce at one of the new stores and after three years to assistant store manager.”
“Although I liked the job and the people in Scranton, I always had a dream to work in Syracuse,” Dean added. “My dad had graduated there in 1959, so as kids we were exposed to SU sports early on and my mom was from that area so we heard about Syracuse a lot growing up. After my dad took me to a SU football game as a kid I knew I wanted to live there some day. When an assistant store manager job in Syracuse was posted by Price Chopper in 1986 I applied and got the job. I was 26.”
When asked about some stories from his perspective as a PC manager, he immediately thought of a shopper at the Fulton store: “There was an elderly customer named Pete who only had one arm. I never knew why, but it was always obvious whenever Pete was coming in the store because he only had one arm and he had this way of walking like he was on a mission — which to us was to complain and cause problems. There would be gasps from the employees whenever they saw him coming like, ‘Oh no, that one-armed Pete is here again!’ He was so mean and he would argue and complain about everything. At this point, Pete had been doing this for months. One day I saw him going through the hams with his one hand and he called to me, ‘Hey, manager’ and started complaining about the price. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I said, ‘Pete, you come in here every day to complain and you’re miserable and you make everybody upset. Do you know what’s going on in the world today? There are people who are starving. People who are dying. There are wars going on. All this is going on in the world and here you’re making a big deal about 5 cents on a ham. It’s just not right?’
“Amazingly, all of a sudden, his demeanor changed and he calmed down, lowered his eyes, and said quietly, ‘You know, you are absolutely right.’ And, would you believe it? From that day forward that guy never complained again and became the best customer I could ever have. We even found out that we both liked reading about local history and I’d go to his house so we could exchange books.”
Dealing with customers, Dean explained, was not the only thing PC managers were required to do. They also had to organize fundraisers.
“Over 10 years Price Chopper raised more than $100,000 for muscular dystrophy,” Dean said. “Many times we did golf tournaments but sometimes we had to be creative. The funniest event a manager and I came up with was what we called, ‘Cow Chip Bingo,’ which we did at the Hechinger Plaza store in 2002. The first thing we did was paint part of the parking lot like a giant bingo card. Then we sold the squares to our customers for something like $40 a square. The bingo card typically has 25 squares so that meant we received $1,000. The lucky winner would win 50% of that, or $500 and muscular dystrophy got the rest. With Cow Chip Bingo, however, nobody called numbers. The winner was going to be the person who bought the square on which the cow pooped. On the Saturday of the event we brought in a live cow, fed it a lot of food, including Little Debbie cupcakes and then led her across the bingo board with a crowd of participants cheering her on to plop on their square. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for the cow to cooperate so one happy customer walked away with a nice profit.”
Dean said one of the highlights of his career was when he worked at the Cortland store. “When I worked in Cortland there were a lot of rural customers that came there from outlying areas in Tompkins County. We used to have a program called ‘Tools for Schools’ and if the families in your local school shopped enough times at our store they could qualify to win school supplies and the top school would win a computer. In 2004, of all the schools in the entire county, Marathon Elementary School, a very small school, won the computer.
“So, the corporate office sent the computer to my store and it was my job to bring it to the school. I called up the school and I explained that they had won the computer and I asked when I could drop it off. They told me Friday evening would be good and they would have everything ready. So, I got directions to the school. It was probably 15 miles from the store over back roads into the country and it was dark out. But finally I found the school in a very small village.
“I immediately noticed that there were a lot of cars in the parking lot surrounding the school. I thought, ‘Huh, there must be some big event going on. I wonder what it is.’ So I went through the front door and there were people in the vestibule to meet me and they said, ‘Oh, Mr. Dean. Welcome. We are so excited to meet you.’ I asked them, ‘Where would you like me to bring the computer? They led me into the school auditorium and said, ‘You can bring it right up on the stage. I looked around and there were all these tables set up with all kinds of desserts and I see some students in costumes. They ushered me up front and said, ‘Mr. Dean you can sit here.’ Then the students did a play and we ate the desserts. Finally, the principal took me by the arm and I was escorted up to the stage. She looked at the crowd and said, ‘Quiet. Quiet everyone. Mr. Dean is here to present the computer.’ That’s when it hit me that they did all this for me. They treated me like I was the governor of the state showing up in Marathon, New York. And the kids also gave me hand-colored thank you cards. The whole community was so grateful and it seemed like they didn’t want me to leave. It was the grandest thing.”
Unfortunately, all the stories Dean told me could not fit into this short article — like the time a local college fraternity faked a kidnapping at the Midler store parking lot or the time a pregnant mom gave birth on the way to her car or the time he had to give CPR to a customer or the time he was called at 4 a.m. about a problem at his store, only to be told seconds later, ‘Oh. Sorry. That was a Vermont store.’”