Two adults entered through a broken front door at H-E-B in Meyerland as Harvey lashed Houston. At first, the off-site personnel monitoring the location’s security cameras assumed it was a break in. Then a third adult passed a baby into the store that already had taken on three feet of water.
It turns out they were just looking for a safe place.
So security contacted them through the store’s intercom: Get up on the check-out counters; help is on the way. H-E-B had arranged for a boat rescue.
While they waited, the water-soaked visitors rearranged sandbags to keep more water from entering the building. Scott McClelland, president of H-E-B Food/Drug, took it as a gesture of good will toward Texas’ largest supermarket chain.
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“What our people did (for them) was amazing,” he said. “But I thought it was an incredible act of kindness for those people to move those sandbags.”
And H-E-B exhibited its fair share of kindness within its own community as the supermarket giant worked to get its stores open and restocked when customers were most in need of essentials.
Of the 114 stores in the Gulf Coast region from Corpus Christi to Beaumont that was in Harvey’s path – H-E-B has 270 in Texas – all but three are now up and running. A feat, given the logistics of procurement and delivery as major arteries throughout the region, were impassable. Meanwhile, the company has given more than 150,000 cases of water and 75,000 10-pound bags of ice to communities in need as well as served 40,000 meals from its convoy of mobile kitchens.
Familiar to many through television commercials, often as the self-deprecating straight man, McClelland is the face of H-E-B in the area, linking him directly with brand loyalty. So when he showed up to the shelter at George R. Brown Convention Center recently, he arrived with food, supplies – and open arms. There were many hugs during his visits with evacuees, embraces he said probably meant more to him than to the people he met.
But as top brass in these parts, his primary focus was to get stores back open so that customers can procure the items they require to start getting their lives back in order. Before the storm, the need was all about water, beer, bread, batteries, salty snacks and canned fish and meat. (“It’s the one time people really get excited about Spam,” he joked.) Post-Harvey, the most popular grocery items were eggs, milk, ramen, macaroni and cheese, fresh meat and easy-to-prepare foods. The store is still struggling with meeting the demand for bread and eggs.
While H-E-B got back on its feet quickly, McClelland doesn’t hesitate to recognize the struggle of recovery. Many employees went to work as they were dealing with personal damage and loss. Of 300 employees at one store in Beaumont, for example, 140 were displaced by the flooding.
Harvey will add new chapters to the H-E-B “playbook” on how to deal with emergencies such as hurricanes and flooding. Transportation, when roads are inaccessible, is an example, he said: “What do you do when you have absolutely no mobility? That’s one of the things we have to look at in the future.”
McClelland’s next order of business is to get the new Kingwood store reopened by Thanksgiving, and the closed location in Woodforest on Uvalde open by end of September. The future of the Meyerland store, which has flooded before, is uncertain.
Within the H-E-B community there’s a lot of talk about the company’s spirit, something Harvey tested mightily, McClelland said. He feels the Texas-proud brand and its employees – including 24,000 in the Houston area – showed their true colors during the ongoing crisis.
“At the end of the day people leave work feeling good they made a difference,” McClelland said, “and made a mark in some way.”
Date: Sep 06, 2017