The Personal Touch

From their employees' viewpoint, the bosses of expanding corporate enterprises often disappear into the paperwork to become remote and impersonal figures of authority rather than flesh-and-blood leaders. Over the past dozen years, John M. Eckerd, 56, has created a Florida drugstore chain with $100 million a year in sales by taking the opposite approach. Eckerd gives zealous attention to the personal touch. "Employees make or break a business," he says. "They should be treated as individuals and not just parts of a wheel."

Better Feedback. Jack Eckerd, who opened his 113th store last week in Tampa, still likes to call his chain "the family drugstore." He sends every one of his 2,600 employees a personal birthday card, welcomes their suggestions and personally answers every one. To get "better feedback" from his pharmacists and counter clerks, he logs 30,000 miles a year at the wheel of his white Porsche roadster, visiting his stores. Every written complaint from a customer also gets a personal reply. "Nine times out of ten I can't help them," Eckerd admits, "but at least they know I'll do my best to correct the trouble." He means it. When a St. Petersburg woman complained about a book her grandson had purchased in one of his stores, not only Playboy but some 500 paperback titles (including even Zorba the Greek) disappeared from the bookracks of Eckerd Drugs of Florida. Today, the stores sell only publications deemed acceptable by the National Office for Decent Literature.

Eckerd learned the drug business from the stock room up, working in his father's pharmacy in Erie, Pa. "If you work for me, you start in the basement," ruled his father. Eckerd quit after six years, but later persuaded his father to sell him one of his several stores in Wilmington, Del.* In 1952, he ventured into Florida by buying three drugstores from an absentee owner. Five years later he sold his Delaware outlets, moved to Clearwater and began expanding. Doubling in size every two years for a decade, Eckerd Drugs has acquired a candy manufacturing concern, the twelve-store Jackson's/Byron's Enterprises department-store chain, Gray Security Inc. (watchmen and alarm systems), and the busiest film-processing laboratory in the state. The company went public in 1959; since then, its stock has moved up to trade on the New York Stock Exchange and has vastly increased in market value from $5,500,000 to $134 million.

Eckerd, who estimates his wealth at "roughly $50 million," believes that people in his income bracket should be more heavily taxed. To help share his own fortune, he has formed a foundation that operates an 880-acre camp for emotionally disturbed boys. "I wanted to invest in people rather than buildings," he explains. To lighten the burden for retired persons on fixed incomes, Eckerd set up a nonprofit Senior Citizen Club; its members qualify for discounts at his drugstores. For his cherished employees, he is working out the details of a more unusual plan. Under it, Eckerd would place 90% of his stock in his company in trust. Over a period of years, options would be granted to all employees to purchase stock at today's market price.

* Another Eckerd Drug chain in Delaware is still run independently by relatives.

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