“Charles Fitzmorris, our IT service provider, enjoys a certain familiarity with our father. My blatant marginalisation from any embryo of an educational path is so obvious that he spontaneously takes the trouble to go and say to him: ‘Bernardo, what is Giuseppe doing here? Let him come to America to gain experience and learn new things!’ (…)
Fitzmorris put me in touch with the family of one of his clients, Dominick Di Matteo, who owns a chain of supermarkets in Chicago. When I got there I immediately made friends with Margaret, Dominick’s daughter, who works as a buyer in the deli. I go in as a general worker, to start from the bottom (…).
I spend my first Thanksgiving at Margaret’s house, with her whole family. I am fascinated by the story of Dominick, a true supermarket pioneer: his father, who owned a grocery shop, had lent him five thousand dollars to open the first self-service shop. From that initial step he created a company bigger than Esselunga, Dominick’s (…).
The experience turns out to be a real school of war. I got on well there and, above all, I began to develop my project, which would prove to be fundamental for us: the superstore, with the inclusion of ‘non-food’ and services in the Esselunga of the time. It was in Chicago, in fact, that I realised how our father was unable to make good use of the increasingly large supermarkets he was opening, including the one in Alessandria, the first above 2000 square metres. Nobody in Esselunga really knows how to fill it: I remember huge shelves full of peeled tomatoes of the same brand, or packs of pasta. And so in all sectors (…).
The superstores are very different from both the normal supermarkets, which have a forcibly more limited offer, and the hypermarkets, the model which in Italy at that time is the most popular and is seriously competing with Esselunga, attracting more and more people to do their shopping outside the city centres, at weekends. (…)
In Chicago, from the guys at Dominick’s, I learn a lot: product management, how to calculate profitability, industrial accounting, planograms for organising space in the shop, the best ways to draw up contracts with suppliers and how to manage the marketing funds you receive from them. When I return to Milan, I try to put what I have learnt to good use straight away. I have been preparing the ground since Chicago, sending my father a fax a day – Saturdays and Sundays included – to show him what I am doing and what could be useful for us at Esselunga. He even came to see me with a group of managers, to meet Di Matteo and observe first-hand the innovations I was telling him about (…). (pp. 139 – 142).
In the lead photograph, taken on that occasion by my father against the backdrop of the Chicago skyscrapers, there is me, Marino Fineschi, Sergio Leogrande, Gabriele Villa, my sister Violetta and Alberto Bianchi.
