Wineka column: Ketner no fan of waste

Ketner contributes a quarter to the jar on his desk everytime he catches himself uttering a bad word. Photo by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

Food Lion co-founder Ralph Ketner looks toward a corner of his Catawba College office at the Ketner School of Business, noting that the Sports Center and School of Business at Tri-State University in Indiana also are named for him. Photo by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

Ketner holds a national Lifetime Achievement Award he won as 1990 Entrepreneur of the Year. Photo by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

Ketner often turns to the calculator on his desk to crunch more numbers. Photo by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

At the front of his desk, Ralph Ketner keeps a cuss jar.

Every time he utters an expletive — they are mild as swear words go — he fishes into his pants pocket for a quarter to deposit in the jar.

Various folks around the Ketner School of Business at Catawba College, where Ketner has an office for as long as he likes, have laid claim to the money when the jar is full.

It's getting there.

Meanwhile, the pinch on his pocketbook has helped the 89-year-old Ketner watch his language a little more closely these days.

Nothing irritates the co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Salisbury-based Food Lion grocery chain more than bad math, waste, inefficiency or the lack of response to one of his letters.

And he has written probably thousands of letters over the years. He's always polite, but Ketner also has a knack for sarcasm and blinding the people he writes to with figures and his own brand of common sense.

It still bugs him that Food Lion's phenomenal success over the last couple decades of the 20th century doesn't put the company — and by default, Salisbury — in the same conversation as Microsoft, Walmart and Warren Buffett.

Ketner says Food Lion's stock at one time outperformed Microsoft 73-to-1, Walmart 12-to-1 and Warren Buffett, 4.4-to-1.

As much as people across the country identify Walmart with Bentonville, Ark., or Buffett with Omaha, Neb., they should connect Food Lion with Salisbury, says Ketner, who received the 1990 Lifetime Achievement and Entrepreneur of the Year awards from Ernst & Young and Merrill Lynch.

Ketner, who keeps all of his letters, ideas and speeches in a file drawer on the right side of his desk, produces a copy of a Dec. 7, 1999, letter he sent to Scott Smith, a feature writer for "Entrepreneur" magazine.

The drawer is just below his calculator, toward which Ketner routinely leans over from his desk chair and pecks out numbers verifying his conclusions.

In the letter, Ketner took issue with Smith's claim that Microsoft was "the most successful stock of the century." Smith made the statement in a story on Bill Gates, who the magazine had dubbed "Entrepreneur of the Millennium."

The story said $10,000 invested in Gates' company's initial public offering was worth $4.8 million by 1999.

Ketner took Smith briefly through the story of Food Lion's founding as Food Town in 1957 and how an original $10,000 investment in the grocery chain would have been worth more than $349 million by the end of 1991. (Ketner left Food Lion in early 1992 after 35 years in roles as president, chief executive officer and chairman.)

Even by the end of the century, after Food Lion came under the Delhaize umbrella and its stock had been discounted, a $10,000 original investment still would have been worth more than $142.5 million, or roughly 30 times the $4.8 million figure for Microsoft, Ketner wrote.

Ketner told Smith it was Food Lion that was the success story of the Millennium. He never heard back.

Ketner never heard back another time, and it led him to realize a tidy profit with his investment in Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

In August 2001, he sent a flattering letter to Krispy Kreme President and CEO Scott Livengood, adding that each Monday morning he picked up a dozen doughnuts at the Salisbury store and shared them with the Ketner Business School staff.

"I personally feel that with the quality of the product your future is unlimited," Ketner told Livengood.

In November 2004, Ketner wrote Livengood another letter after a Charlotte Observer story noted that Krispy Kreme's stock had dropped to $9 a share, after reaching a high of $40 a share in 2003.

Seeing the newspaper article, Ketner said, reminded him of the 2001 letter he had sent Livengood.

"I never received a reply from you and, as a result, I sold my Krispy Kreme stock at that time for a profit," Ketner told the Krispy Kreme executive. "The purpose of this letter is to thank you for not answering the attached because, if you had, no doubt I would have continued to hold your stock."

Ketner has recently returned from a trip to Las Vegas. He says he has given up playing blackjack which, thanks to his "system," he never left the table as a loser.

Instead, he plays Texas hold 'em, a game trying his patience because seven out of 10 times you have to just throw in your cards, he says.

Ask Ketner how he's spending his days in Salisbury, and he reports, "Obviously, I'm hard up," because he has been going through his files and pulling out old letters, speeches and brainstorms.

"All of these are smart things I have done," he jokes.

Ketner has had a lot of brilliant ideas in his lifetime. At least a half-dozen things he started with Food Lion have become long accepted practices in the grocery industry. He gives $10,000 each year to the N.C. Association of County Commissioners, which supplies cash awards to county employees with the best cost-saving ideas.

Over 20 years, the accumulated savings for taxpayers has been more than $36 million.

Ketner always says he "bet the company" in 1967 when he changed Food Lion's whole pricing structure, capsulized in his mantra that five fast pennies are worth more than a slow nickel.

Food Lion later thrived under the slogan LFPINC — Lowest Food Prices in North Carolina. Ketner describes himself today as the LPCINC — the Lowest-Priced Consultant in North Carolina. People still sit in front of his desk, pitching their business ideas or seeking his counsel on why things are going wrong.

Ketner believes that "most of us are where we are today through accidents."

"But it's what you do with the opportunities that sets people apart," he says.

Ketner once had an idea for getting several of Salisbury's millionaires together to create a "think tank." He envisioned the men meeting periodically to hear business ideas and consider investing in things they thought would work.

He couldn't persuade the others to join him.

Ketner also laments that the federal government — namely the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — rejected his program to develop affordable housing. He once had U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina hand-deliver his letter about the housing idea to the first President Bush.

"When you write your president, how much further can you go?" Ketner asks.

Ketner offered Housing Secretary Jack Kemp and HUD $1 million to help low-income people become owners of 1,288-square-foot houses delivered at a cost of $34,000 each. (Ketner has helped to build 24 homes in Salisbury.)

He envisioned "Ralph Ketners" in other states stepping forward with similar donations to build houses under his blueprint, but the concept just didn't mesh with HUD's bureaucracy. It didn't help that Ketner never heard back from Kemp after meeting with him personally.

"If somebody offers you a million bucks, you just don't ignore him," Ketner says. He thinks his program would have built at least 50,000 affordable homes in the country by now.

It heartens Ketner that he personally has been able to contribute millions of dollars to various other projects and causes and that Food Lion investors have done the same.

"I'd rather write down that I gave it than write down that I have it," Ketner says.

Truth be known, he adds, the Food Lion co-founders (he, his brother, Brown, and Wilson Smith) could easily have been billionaires with the likes of Gates and Buffet, if he had allowed them all to take stock options and golden parachutes.

But the thought of that never crossed Ketner's mind.

"Hell, I just worked there," he says.

Ketner dives into his pocket for another quarter.

Read Mark Wineka's blog, "Wineka's World," at www.salisburypost.com.