George Jenkins and the Grocery Store That Changed Florida

The company that may have shaped everyday life in Florida more than any other was not founded here, but it grew up here. George Washington Jenkins was born in Georgia in nineteen hundred and seven and arrived in Tampa at seventeen with almost nothing. He took a stock clerk job at a Piggly Wiggly grocery store, was promoted to manager, and was transferred to manage the chain's largest store in Winter Haven. On September sixth, nineteen thirty, at the age of twenty-two, he opened his own store in Winter Haven and called it Publix Food Store. He liked the sound of the name, borrowed from a chain of movie theaters he admired.

Jenkins moved his company's headquarters to Lakeland in nineteen forty-five, when he purchased a small grocery chain called All American Food Stores that operated nineteen locations across the region. Lakeland has been Publix's home ever since. A warehouse and office complex went up here in the nineteen fifties, and the company grew outward from Lakeland in every direction, eventually becoming the largest employee-owned supermarket chain in the United States.

Jenkins's operating philosophy was distinctive for the era. He shared ownership with his employees, installing profit-sharing and stock-ownership programs that made even stockers and cashiers partial owners of the company they worked for. The model turned out to be durable. Publix consistently ranks among the best American workplaces, a distinction that traces directly to the structure Jenkins put in place in the nineteen thirties and forties.

Jenkins died in April nineteen ninety-six at age eighty-eight. Publix by then operated hundreds of stores across multiple states with revenues in the billions. The company's headquarters is still in Lakeland, still employee-owned, still running on principles a twenty-two-year-old from Georgia sketched out in a small Winter Haven storefront.