Personal finance with Ralph and Al: Corporations putting stock options in wrong place

By Emily Ford

eford@salisburypost.com

Corporations today have their priorities backward, Food Lion co-founder and multi-millionaire Ralph Ketner told Catawba College students.

When Ketner was running Food Lion, customers were his top priority, followed by employees and stockholders.

Executives came in dead last, Ketner said.

“The founders of Food Lion never got one stock option,” he said. “We had an obligation to those people who invested.”

Now, CEOs receive stock options and bonuses worth millions of dollars.

“They have reversed my philosophy,” he said. “The CEOs take care of themselves first. If there is anything left, then the shareholders. The customers are last on the totem pole.”

Ketner’s parents died when he was a young boy, and he grew up selling newspapers. He worked for Dan Nicholas, namesake of Dan Nicholas Park, and still can rattle off a long list of concessions from popcorn to ice cream in almost one breath.

He never graduated from college but has several honorary degrees.

In 1957, Ketner said he and two other Food Lion co-founders — Wilson Smith and Ketner’s brother Brown — became the original telemarketers, going through the phone book to cold call Salisbury residents and raise the money they needed to open their first grocery store.

Pledging from a few dollars to $2,000, 250 people invested in Food Lion, which eventually outperformed Microsoft 72 to 1, Ketner said.

While Ketner receives accolades for his entrepreneurism, he said the real entrepreneur in his family was his father, a farmer.

Bob Ketner slaughtered animals on the side, and when he had to pay almost half as much for a few steaks as the butcher had paid him for the whole cow, he decided to cut out the middle man and open his own butcher shop.

“It took nerve to move from the farm to a butcher shop,” Ketner said of his father.

Students also learned about health insurance, renter’s insurance, car insurance and other monthly expenses as they continue to determine whether someone can live on $3,000 a month.

A man’s lament to Ketner that he couldn’t live on $36,000 a year launched the personal finance class at Catawba, where Ketner aims to show college students they can live on that amount.

Contact reporter Emily Ford at 704-797-4264.