What we have is a pay structure that, on basic wages, is higher than market rate, as a general statement. When you look at other forms of retail, whether they be food or non-food, we pay more. If you look at our health care benefits, we pay a lot more.
Steven Burd
We're trying to take a leadership role in solving the nation's health-care crisis. We want everybody in this country to have health insurance.
I'm no health care expert, but you've got technology that constantly advances the ability to extend life and maybe improve lifestyle. That puts constant upward pressure on health care costs.
The first job I ever had was right here in San Francisco with Southern Pacific.
In our experience at Safeway, we're confident that we can actually improve the quality of health care while taking costs down and using the savings to help finance coverage of low-income people who are clearly going to need help to pay for insurance.
If the store were your own business, you'd escort the customer to a product's location in the store and refer to the customer by name.
I need more personal time and, given my extensive work in health care, I want to pursue that interest further.
You know that a lot of people go to emergency rooms when they don't really need to.
We're a high-volume, low-margin business, so we decided to reinvent our own approach to health care.
We've been paying for 100 percent of preventive care. But if you're not getting annual physicals, then you're not going to gain a financial incentive, so effectively your insurance premium with us will go up.
The most challenging part of being CEO is communicating to 200,000 people what you want done.
The first person a customer speaks with has the greatest impact on that customer's impression of Safeway.
People like to work for a winner.
