Jason Johnson learned a valuable lesson during his first year as a grocery store manager: How not to manage.
“My first year, I spent just about every waking minute inside that store, and that was taxing on the people in the store, myself and my family,” Johnson said. “It took, probably 10 months of being a store manager to realize I was doing it the wrong way. I had to take a step back, let my people do what they’re there to do and not be so involved in every little thing that happened in the store. That was challenging for me but I realized it takes a team in order to be successful.”
Learning that lesson early on set Johnson on the road to success. This year, Johnson, store manager for K-VA-T Food Stores’ Food City in Gray, Tenn., celebrates 10 years as a grocery store manager, and his management style has earned him a 2025 Store Manager Award from FMI – The Food Industry Association.
From courtesy clerk to store manager
Johnson’s career with Food City began at age 17 as a courtesy clerk at Food City on Virginia Avenue in Bristol, Tenn., where he bagged groceries and retrieved shopping carts from the parking lot.
“It was my first job. I worked through high school and then said, ‘Hey, I need more hours. I’ve got to pay for my truck,’” Johnson said. “I worked about every position in that store and trained in just about every department, and, somewhere along the way, I realized I was pretty good at it. I enjoyed working with people, whether it was customers, community members, associates – everybody. I realized within a few years that I could make a career out of doing something I enjoyed doing.”
Today, his career in the grocery industry spans over two decades, marked by steady advancement through roles of increasing responsibility. Alongside his day-to-day experience, he has completed industry-leading training such as Dale Carnegie courses, FMI’s Future Leaders eXperience, Retail Management Certificate Program and SafeMark Certified Food Protection Manager program.
Mentoring the food industry leaders of tomorrow
Johnson now serves as a training store manager, mentoring assistant managers and interns, and teaching core management skills to upcoming leaders. His commitment to both learning and teaching shaped his journey from entry-level associate to an award-winning leader.
“Everybody does everything in order for a store to be a success,” Johnson said. “I try to instill that in all my people from the start. I ask this question in the job interview: ‘Even though it’s not your job, if I ask you to clean bathrooms, are you willing to do that?’ Because everybody needs to be willing to jump in. We’ve got to work together better, and doing that makes us more of a family. I would say my top priority is making sure that everybody understands that we’re all one team. It’s really easy to come in and say, ‘Well, I’m in the produce department. I’m just going to focus on the produce department.’ But when you are in produce, there’s a whole store around you. We all work together. And when we run up on one of those challenging days — maybe we have lost power, maybe we’ve got an illness going through the store, and a lot of people are out — well, now we’ve got a lot more people who know how to work in other departments because we’ve worked as a team and cross-trained as a team.”
Watching his associates grow, learn, and earn promotions is the part of the job Johnson loves most.
“When you watch a 16-year-old come in and start in a courtesy clerk position and you watch them an they move up to head cashier or front-end manager or they move into a grocery department or the meat department and learn a trade skill there – seeing their growth and knowing that there’s so much further they can go with this company, that has to be my favorite thing,” he said.
But a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work when it comes to building leaders, Johnson said.
“Every person has to be held accountable to the same standards in every job position, but every person is an individual, which means we need to figure out who that individual is and treat them according to their individuality,” he said. “We can’t treat everybody the same. We’ve got to be fair, but we’ve also got to understand our people. What makes me tick is not the same thing that makes somebody else tick. This is a people business, so if we can get our minds wrapped around that and learn how to do that the right way, we’ll be successful.”
Some things will never change
Even though technology has advanced at a dizzying pace in the grocery industry over the last five years, customer service will continue to be of supreme importance now, and in the years to come, Johnson predicts.
“I think customer service is going to continue to be a very, very important thing,” Johnson said. “You know, customers are going to want to come in, and they’re going to want to still deal with people. For a little while, it looked like it wasn’t going to be the case. It looked like it was going to be robotics and self-checkouts and everything. But I think we’re going to see an industry-wide bigger shift toward customer service over the next few years. That’s our company’s bread and butter – we put the customer first, always. Is there going to continue to be a push for more technology? Yeah, for sure, but it all has to work together with the customer in mind first in order to be successful.”
This is the first installment in a series of spotlights on FMI — The Food Industry Association’s 2025 Store Manager Award winners. Click below to read profiles on the 2024 award winners:
- Q&A: A day in the life of an award-winning grocery store manager
- The Fresh Market leader shares lessons learned from stock boy to store manager
- How a co-op grocery store manager brings Seattle’s diverse community together
- Inspirational speeches, funny uniform inscriptions part of store manager’s motivational toolkit
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