In it emerged from bankruptcy by executing the bankruptcy plan of US Bankruptcy court. In , it was one of the top 75 retailers of the US. Very concerned when walk into Bi -lo Walnut Street Travels Rest, manager and few employees without face mask …All grocery stores had to wear them!! Please log in again. The login page will open in a new tab. After logging in you can close it and return to this page.
Anthony Hucker. Anthea Jones. Senior Vice President of Store Operations. Bill Nasshan. Senior Vice President of Marketing and Merchandising. Joyce Smart. Director of Corporate Communications.
Joan Miszak. Rusty Streetman. The number of bulls denoted the size of the store. One-bull stores were the smallest, three-bull stores the largest. In its first seven years, the chain went from two locations to By the time Outlaw passed away in , there were more than 70 locations in North Carolina and South Carolina.
In , two years after Outlaw's death, Dutch retail conglomerate Royal Ahold bought the company. In its first 16 years in operation, Bi-Lo grew quickly. In the years that immediately followed, that growth exploded. Larry Zitzke, who once headed up the company's maintenance and construction department, started working for the supermarket in He said in his first year alone, he oversaw the construction of close to 30 new stores.
That didn't even include the supermarkets they remodeled, updated or rebranded after acquisitions. Between and , the chain grew from 79 stores in two states to in four states with 23, employees, according to archives from the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. And while the chain was owned by an international conglomerate based in the Netherlands, its identity as a country market with a close-knit, familial atmosphere endured, former employees said in interview after interview.
Marsh Collins, who served as Bi-Lo's CEO from to , said he and other company leaders communicated regularly with corporate Ahold.
But business was booming, so the Dutch retailer allowed the chain's management to operate with relative autonomy. The grocery store fostered a hands-on leadership style and open communication companywide, from shelf stockers to vice presidents. The supermarket business is highly competitive and operates on razor-thin margins. It lives and dies on prices and customer service. In that kind of environment, Collins said, it is essential to understand what is happening on the ground floor.
To cultivate that mentality, management put a premium on loyalty and brought employees up through the ranks. People like Simmons, former vice president Myron Jennings and Streetman, who retired in as a regional vice president, all started bagging groceries as teens and worked their way to the upper echelons.
Collins started his career as a bagger at a grocery store in Chicago. Under Ahold, the next generations of families who built the brand remained. Frank Outlaw Jr. Simmons became manager of Bi-Lo's sprawling distribution center in Mauldin to replace his father who, like Streetman's father, was a member of the first class of Bi-Lo employees. Jennings got his first job at the store his brother managed and both of them stayed with the company for decades.
Bi-Lo invested in the community where it got its start. In , the company sponsored the construction of a new, 15,seat arena in downtown Greenville which was dubbed the Bi-Lo Center. Many long-time residents still use that name to refer to Greenville's largest event space, though it has been the Bon Secours Wellness Arena since As the company thrived, employees on every level said they had a sense that their work played a part in growing the business.
Looking back, Streetman said the supermarket reached its peak under Ahold, particularly during Collins' tenure. In , Ahold bought Maryland-based U. The sale was part of a larger, aggressive expansion — orchestrated by then Ahold CEO Cees van der Hoeven — in which the conglomerate bought 50 companies and assumed significant debt in a short span of time. It was a push that came as the already competitive grocery store business was heating up.
The emergence of new chains left smaller and mid-sized companies jostling for market share as Walmart took the lead nationally, Collins said. But in , Ahold's efforts to keep pace backfired when large-scale financial fraud was discovered at U. Food Services. As the controversy played out in media reports around the world, the value of Ahold shares dropped by about two-thirds overnight. Embroiled in scandal, staring down billions in potential fines and settlements, and with executives facing possible jail time, the company was pushed to the brink of bankruptcy.
Less than a year later, Lone Star announced the sale or closure of stores operated by Bi-Lo LLC, more than a quarter of all of its locations. But none were closed in South Carolina. At the time, then-CEO of Bi-Lo LLC Dean Cohagan told the newspaper the closures were part of a strategic effort to invest more in South Carolina, where the chain still held close to 20 percent of the market share statewide and about 35 percent in the Greenville area.
In April of , Lone Star announced plans to sell Bi-Lo, an effort it abandoned a few months later, citing volatility in the market.
In March , Bi-Lo filed for bankruptcy for the first time. As the company worked to steady itself, it saw four different CEOs at the helm, including one interim, in just three years, according to archives from The Greenville News. While dealing with the bankruptcy, and shortly after emerging from Chapter 11 protection in , Lone Star again considered selling the company. In , shortly after merging with Winn-Dixie, the company sold its Mauldin headquarters on Bi-Lo Boulevard where fiberglass bulls once grazed in a small pen out front.
The operation relocated to Jacksonville, Fla. Shortly after, the company announced it would not renew its naming rights for the Bi-Lo Center, Upstate Business Journal reported at the time. About five years after that, Bi-Lo again filed for bankruptcy. Through it all, the company continued to shrink and investment in stores steadily declined amid fierce competition.
Allan, the founder of the Bi-Lo Alumni group, remembers being called to a conference center in with other managers in the region for a meeting. They were required to sign a nondisclosure agreement before they walked in the door. Inside, they were given lists of employees they would lay off in the coming days. When Southeastern Grocers announced in the middle of last year it would discontinue the Bi-Lo brand, former employees said they were saddened but not surprised. As Bi-Lo struggled though the past 15 years, supermarket options around Smart's home grew more numerous.
She still shops at her Bi-Lo sometimes. She feels loyalty to the company and still knows some of the people who work at her local store. But the signs of its decline have become increasingly apparent over time. She sees them as she walks the produce aisle and waits in the checkout line. It isn't the employees' fault, she said. What are you doing in here? Collins said he hasn't shopped in years at the grocery chain he once led as CEO.
There are hints of anger and sadness in his voice when he talks about the separation. When he retired in , his co-workers, subordinates and managers put together a binder full of memories from his time with the company. His father received the same when he left Bi-Lo. Simmons still has both. His father's sits in a place of honor on the mantle and he keeps his own safely tucked away in his Taylors home.
He cracked open his binder recently for the first time since retiring and leafed through the laminated pages. Inside, he found photos, messages and memories similar to those that have flooded the Bi-Lo Alumni Facebook group in the past seven months. Instead of pictures snapped with smartphones, these are images captured on film and pasted lovingly on pieces of cardboard and construction paper. They show scenes from the warehouse that Simmons managed, group shots of the Bi-Lo softball team, photos of people he worked with for more than half of his life.
He is sad to see the end of the company he helped build but his connection to the Bi-Lo name is too deep to shop somewhere else. Now, with the locations near his house closing, his wife is in the market for a new grocery store.
Zitzke finds himself in the same position. He helped build his local store, as he did at so many locations across the Upstate. He left town for a few days in January and came back to find operations were already winding down. While the name is disappearing, there's a sense for some the chain's legacy will live on. In , Royal Ahold became half of Ahold-Delhaize through a merger, and by extension the owner of the Food Lion grocery store chain.
The company bought more than 60 Bi-Lo stores across the Southeast, as well as the Mauldin warehouse that Bi-Lo formerly owned and which has continued to serve as its distribution center through a contractor. An executive with the Dutch company recently told The Post and Courier they plan to keep as many workers at the warehouse "as humanly possible. In one post in the Bi-Lo Alumni group, a woman celebrated that she and her friend were both hired on by Food Lion. The two met as teens in when Bi-Lo hired them and have both continued to work for the supermarket since.
Another photo shows a group of employees standing in a store, mid-transition.
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