President Worth called the meeting to order at 12:45 p.m. Leland Parks delivered the Health and Happiness report. He commended the Charlotte Rotary board for its hard work but noted that under President Worth's leadership the board meetings lasted forever. In fact, board members were checking their calendars, not their watches. He also told stories about two of our most beloved targets — Bill Wood and the newspaper. Don Carmichael introduced the visiting Rotarians and guests, including a welcome guest from Russia. President Worth asked four tables seating the members of the Fellowship Committee to stand up and be recognized. They wanted to impress us with the fact that they were trying to improve fellowship between the Fellowship Committee members.
     Rick Jackson reported on the morning news. Among other items he mentioned that, sadly, the death toll in Turkey had reached over 18,000. He also mentioned that the Princeton Review had developed a list of the top 20 party schools in the country. Florida State University and the University of Florida were number 1 and number 2 respectively. The school that was the most stone cold sober was Brig-ham Young. Tom Meckley announced that Charlotte Rotary is currently taking nominations for this year's Excellence in Management award that is being co-sponsored with the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce and the Business Journal. The deadline for nominations is September 13 and the award presentation will be at the November 9 meeting of Charlotte Rotary.
     Cindy Johnston introduced a special guest, Sharon Darling, president of the National Center for Family Literacy, who spent a few minutes sharing some of the national perspective on family literacy. The focus now is on literacy of parents and children together with the parents' emphasis on getting jobs and getting out of poverty and the children's emphasis on doing well in school. Sharon had worked with the Knight Foundation to fund five pilot projects across the country and had selected Charlotte as one of those five projects. Three of the things Charlotte had going for it were CPCC and Charlotte Meek Schools working together, the talent of Cindy Johnston and the commitment and involvement of Ken Harris. Sharon also thanked Charlotte Rotary for the over $50,000 they had committed to the local literacy efforts over the last few years.
     President Worth led us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Barry Miller gave the invocation. Our president introduced the head table, which included Tony Zeiss, Henry Bostic, Barry Miller, Mark Norman, Herb Harriss and Ed Kizer, who introduced our guest speaker, Bill McCanless.
     Bill was born and raised in Salisbury. He graduated from UNC-Charlotte in 1979 and in 1982 from Wake Forest Law School. He was in private practice until 1989 when he became the general counsel for Food Lion headquarters in Salisbury. He became President and CEO in April of this year.
     Mr. McCanless mentioned that Food Lion is the largest employer in North Carolina with 35,000 employees. Last year, they had $11 billion in sales from 1,258 stores. They also have Cash-n-Carry stores in Florida. They are opening 90 stores this year across the country, and are remodeling or expanding 130 others. Their primary focus as a corporation continues to be extra low prices, the focus of their founder, Ralph Ketner.
     Their customers demand convenience: they don't want to drive far; they want a smaller store size so they can get in and out; they want product selection that can be heated and ready to eat. That kind of product can accommodate the reduced meal preparation time from 2 hours in the 1960's to 20 minutes in the 1990's. Customers are now looking to shop once a week instead of several times a week so the product selection has changed to respond to that customer shift.
     Food Lien is also using technology to target market to their customers through the use of the frequent shopper card. They get a 25% redemption to this kind of marketing versus 2% redemption in the paper. In addition to the trend of using technology to market to their customers, they are also facing and participating in two other phenomena of the 1990's — consolidation and globalization. In recent months, they have decided to change their public name to DeLays, their parent and partner in Belgium; they will be moving from the Nasdaq to the New York Stock Exchange; and they have acquired Hannaford's.

*    *   *

Click here for photos of this Meeting