Perrette

"During the years that followed, Alain Bouchard opened Perrette stores at lightning speed. As soon as a suitable location was found for a franchise, he was given two weeks to design the store, paint it, install coolers, shelves and counters and arrange merchandise. Nothing could get in the way of him attending opening day for each store, which always took place on a weekend. “I loved that moment. You could feel the excitement of everyone waiting outside before the doors opened.” The energy was that much higher when Perrette promised a complimentary milk jug to the first 500 clients and granted specials on other products, to promote the full range of their offerings. The company grew so quickly that Perrette often opened new stores before it had even found managers to run them. It was Alain who was given the job in the interim, but never for long, since he was the sole specialist when it came to openings. The supermarkets watched the growth of the blue-and-white-signed stores with a mixture of astonishment and amusement. “Everyone was laughing at them,” said Gaétan Frigon, who headed a number of grocery store chains in Quebec over the decades. “It was a company that wanted to sell milk, period.” To his mind, Perrette stores were marginally more menacing than the small corner grocers that had developed anarchically, transforming the living rooms of their apartments into stores."

"Gilles, the eldest son of the Bouchard family, decided to go into business, and bought a franchise located near Laval: a grocery store attached to a dairy. The formula had been created 15 years earlier in Ontario with the Becker’s chain. Becker’s was a network of convenience stores specializing in the sale of homemade dairy products. The dairy, owned by a Canadian businessman of Greek origin, Frank Bazos, essentially created its own distribution network. The idea was based on the vertical integration model used by major oil companies, which have their own gas stations. In Quebec, Robert Bazos, another member of the family, had undertaken to reproduce this concept starting with a dairy located in Laval. In a stroke of marketing genius, he named the chain, Perrette.[[11]](private://read/01j5mtjqkzkqnzrmf5b4rr6pr2/#notes11) At that time, all Quebec Francophones had grown up hearing the 17th-century fable by Jean de La Fontaine *The Milkmaid and her Pail.* Many had had to memorize it in school, an exercise that had little use in itself, but that had the advantage of occupying students for hours. The story begins like this: “Perrette, having a pot of milk on her head…” thus Francophone Quebecers naturally associated the name Perrette with milk products. Robert Bazos also had the idea to sell milk in reusable plastic containers. Rather than throwing them out after using them and losing the value for the deposit, clients had a reason to return their milk jugs to Perrette—the only distributor of the brand—and buy a new one. With this tactic, Bazos secured the loyalty of his customers, while hoping that they would also buy other products, like cigarettes or newspapers."

"In July of 1969, while he was on his annual vacation, Alain Bouchard had taken over the store for his brother so that the storekeeper could take some vacation time for himself. A Perrette supervisor came in just as the young man was reorganizing the shelves. “So you’re the one who makes the store look so good?” the supervisor asked him, and promptly offered him the responsibility of organizing the interior of new stores. It was an attractive offer—but salaries in the construction industry were also attractive. Alain Bouchard was earning $3.30 an hour on the construction sites. Perrette was offering $1.50 an hour, which was less than half that. “However, I asked him, ‘Can I work as many hours as I want?’” says Bouchard. “No problem,” was the supervisor’s response. Having a 20-year-old’s energy made all the difference, he says. To make the equivalent wages, he would simply have to work twice as many hours per week; but he would be doing something he actually enjoyed. It would finally allow him to fulfill what his father had taught him: The important thing in a man’s life is to make a name for himself through work. Alain Bouchard threw himself into the job with an extraordinary ardour. “I really clocked some hours. It was ridiculous. I was working 80 hours a week,” he says."

"In addition to designing new stores and organizing launches, he was entrusted with renovating older stores. He was named territory supervisor, which involved regular visits to each store and mentoring the managers. The demands on him were clearly too great; there wasn’t a moment of downtime. He realized he wasn’t the only one who was becoming burnt out. His work with dealerships had allowed him to see behind the scenes, and he discovered the extent to which the company’s operating system was interfering with their functioning. “I saw the numbers,” he says. They didn’t show Perrette in a rosy light. For one thing, the dealerships had to pay the head office for any products lost due to shoplifting—and it wasn’t the wholesale price they wanted for the stolen items, but the retail price. Each shoplifting experience was thus triply costly: the dealers lost the value of the product; they lost the profit that was anticipated from the sale; and they had to pay this unrealized profit to the company’s management. It cut into revenues that most dealers already thought were too low. “I lost dealers constantly, and I lost good ones,” says Bouchard, who would inevitably find himself with the burden of finding and training replacements."

"One day he had the opportunity to speak directly with Robert Bazos, who was passing through to inspect renovation work for the Perrette in his own neighbourhood, the Town of Mount Royal. Bouchard told him that the turnover rate for dealers was much too high and that replacing them was costing the company a lot. “Try to find a formula for them to make more money, and that will make them stay with us longer,” he suggested. Bouchard can still hear Bazos’ response, as clearly as he did that day: “Mind your own business.”"

"Provigo, a Francophone-led grocery store chain that was experiencing massive growth in Quebec, also made him an offer: supervisor for a chain of mid-sized grocery stores under the name Provibec, a kind of hybrid of Perrette stores and supermarkets. The position didn’t seem to offer much in the way of challenge, so he declined. Two days later, however, Provigo came back with a new offer. Would he be interested in launching a new store concept within the Provigo family, with the unique feature of being open morning to night, seven days a week? In short, they asked him to help build a banner—Provi-Soir—that would mount an attack against none other than Perrette. “I was the only person in Quebec who had the experience. And they were ready to pay for it. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”"

"Facing the several dozen people present, he began to speak. He thanked the employees for their continued efforts. Then he went on to deliver a prediction that left his audience stunned. Their company, he told them, would become the largest convenience store chain in Quebec. “The other partners and I just stared at each other,” says D’Amours. “We definitely had a long way to go to catch up with Provi-Soir, which had 200 stores, or Perrette, which had 125. We only had 12!” Fortin was also in shock. “Bouchard hadn’t told us about his announcement beforehand. Réal Plourde and I agreed that it was a very nice goal—but could we actually achieve it?”"

"A temporary absence of his immediate superior due to health problems gave him the opportunity he wanted. While his boss was in the hospital, Bouchard found independent retailers that Provi-Soir could acquire and quickly transform. Bouchard, in a hurry to capitalize on the growing reputation of the Provi-Soir banner, believed it was necessary to step up the pace in order to win the battle against Perrette. Almost overnight, the brand could strike a major blow and acquire 25 new stores, all in the Montreal area. Even better, these stores were operational, and therefore had a known and quantifiable customer base, which would reduce the risks."

"Next Bouchard had to find trustworthy employees to run the store while he took care of developing the enterprise. He immediately thought of Jacques D’Amours, a brilliant young man he had met seven years before when they both worked at Perrette. Bouchard was a replacement manager at the time, and D’Amours—then barely 14 years old—was a jack of all trades. He had no option but to mature early; his father had left the family and his mother was raising 11 children on her own. All of the D’Amours children had to start working at a very young age."