Atlantic & Pacific Brothers

Fortnight ago the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. announced that it would close its 300 stores in Cleveland for good & all. Just a week later A. & P. announced that it would forthwith reopen all its Cleveland stores. Those events bracketed two events in industrial history:

Event No. 1 was the first major assault of organized labor on a big chain-store system. Whether or not, as the Cleveland Federation of Labor charged, the A. & P. had frowned on its employes' joining unions, the fact remained that relatively few A. & P. employes in Cleveland belonged to them.* Attacking at a most vulnerable spot, Cleveland unionists called a strike of union truck drivers who worked not for A. & P. but for companies under contract to deliver goods from A. & P. warehouses to A. & P. stores. A. & P. retaliated by closing its 300 Cleveland stores, discharging all its Cleveland employes (TIME, Nov. 5). This was a new and deadly kind of industrial warfare. The National Labor Relations Board worked out a quick solution, accepted by both sides after four days' delay. Chief points: A. & P. would reopen in Cleveland and notify its employes that it had no objection to their joining unions; the unions must refrain from intimidating A. & P. employes into joining.

Possible significance: unions should be specifically forbidden to coerce employes to join a union as employers are forbidden to coerce them not to join--that would be a major precedent in labor relations. Said the National Association of Manufacturers last week: "This coercion through which a small group of determined men can bully many more and drive them unwillingly from their employment must be eliminated if peace is again to be part of our industrial life." It announced it would urge all State legislatures to "make picketing illegal when it is carried on in such a manner as to intimidate or coerce employes or customers."

Event No. 2 was the first appearance of the Brothers Hartford, John and George, as Newspaper Characters. Brother John, president,of A. & P., came & went in the Press, issued statements, appeared before the Labor Relations Board, even had his picture taken and published. More remarkable still, Older Brother George, chairman of A. & P., actually had his name printed on the front page, was briefly reported in Cleveland. The fact that it was an error--his brother John was meant-- made the incident no less unique.

Both brothers, now in their sixties, married but childless, began their careers in their father's red-fronted Great American Tea Co. on Vesey Street, Manhattan. Brother George at 15 was cashier, personally counting by hand every dollar of the daily receipts of what was then a vast chain of 100 tea stores. Brother John, seven years younger, joined the firm at 16. They and their father ran the business until 1917 when the eldest Hartford died. In 1912 they had 400 stores, but that was only a beginning. In that year John & George decided to found a cash-and-carry store handling not only tea and a few sidelines but general groceries. Today their chain numbers nearly 16,000 stores literally spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It does nearly $1,000,000,000 a year gross business on a profit margin of about 22% and employs nearly 100,000 people. It is run by the Brothers Hartford and a staff of assistants nearly every one of whom rose from grocery counters in their stores.

Brother John, the president, shuttles about the country attending to business when he is not hiding away in his Vast Valhalla, N. Y. estate or lunching in solitude at the Biltmore. His well-tailored grey clothes and his inevitable moth-winged half ascot tie are recognized at directors meetings of a few great corporations, by occasional A. & P. store managers when he drops in for a chat, but he is very. very seldom heard of by the consuming public. Brother George is not heard of or recognized at all. He sits in his bare office in Manhattan's Graybar Building and tends as strictly and shrewdly to A. & P. finances as he did when, as a plump boy of 15, he counted A. & P. money in the cashier's cage on Vesey Street. In his homely way he decided that things were going too fast in the 20s. In 1927, he put his heavy foot down and ordered A. & P. to make no leases for over one year ahead. That policy saved his company millions of dollars in Depression.

*The company estimated only 40 union members among its 2,200 Cleveland employes. The unions refused to estimate.

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