RIP Fred Meijer: A Great Example of the Greatness of the 1%

Fred Meijer, the Chairmen and co-founder of Meijer, passed away last month, and although I am hesitant to politicize his death, I really think that in his life and death there are important lessons for voters and citizens of our great nation.

Dutch immigrants Hendrik Meijer and his son, Frederik Gerhard Hendrik Meijer (Fred Meijer), founded the grocery superstore Meijer's in Greenville, Michigan during the height of the Great Depression in 1934. After studying trends in the grocery industry, Meijer was among the first store to offer self-service shopping and shopping carts, giving customers more freedom to choose the products that they wanted to buy without waiting for a helping hand from a friendly grocer. Meijer also worked hard to find and offer staple items at bargain prices, saving his customer money.

In 1962, the modern format of Meijer was started, with a store at the corner of 28th Street and Kalamazoo in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that set the standard for hypermarkets today. Unlike other grocers of the day, this store was large (180,000 square feet) and combined grocery shopping and department store shopping into a single large store, pioneering one-stop shopping. When Hendrik died, Fred Meijer took over a company that had dozens of stand-alone grocery stores and several large stores and expanded the company over the next several decades until it had over 190 stores spread between several states in the Midwest, revenues approaching $15 billion, 72,000 employees, and was rated as one of the biggest retailers in America.

Fred Meijer became very wealthy, and because of this, many in our nation might feel that he should have been taxed more, that he should have done more to help out others, or that we needed a government to confiscate his ill-gotten wealth from him and redistribute it to people who were somehow more deserving. He was one of the so-called 1%, and lived in a very nice community when he died.

But Meijer worked hard for his wealth and did more with it to benefit our society than government ever could redistributing it to others. To earn his wealth, he worked hard and used his talents in ways that benefited people greatly. For example, Wal-mart initially failed because Sam Walton thought that you could just tack on a grocery store to a discount store- but Fred Meijer knew that quality was important too, and so his stores were successful because of the quality produce and meat in them. Wal-Mart figured this out, improved its quality, and has been a success since. The success that Meijer earned through his hard work benefited all of us in higher quality foods in hyperstores, sold at cheap prices so that even poor people can now eat quality meats, cheeses, and produce.

Fred Meijer also gave back to his community in ways that government employees seizing his wealth and giving it to others could never understand. Perhaps his most significant contribution has been the land and sculpture collection for the 132-acre Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, a botanic garden and sculpture park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. But he also donated land for a Grand Valley State University campus in Holland, Michigan, donated a section of the Berlin Wall (which now stands in the Meijer Lobby of the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids) personally offered a donation of $25 million and property to fund a relocation and expansion of the historic John Ball Zoo (voters voted against the proposal), donated $1 million to Michigan's White Pine Trail State Park for improvements, helped renovate Grand Rapids' downtown Civic Theatre, and has done many more projects too. He even bought a big-screen TV for residents of his retirement community so they could watch the Super Bowl better.

And perhaps most important, for nearly 80 years Meijer has contributed to the tax base of the states and communities where it has a presence.

Mr. Meijer worked hard for his wealth and had a right to do with it as he pleased- unlike a national government which believes that it has a right to his wealth simply because it has the power to take it from him. His hard work, innovation, and lifetime achievements created this wealth and it is to him to determine how it should be spent- and we should be grateful that we have people like him around. This class-warfare and envy that is engulfing our nation needs to stop, and we must once again celebrate success, achievement, and greatness, and not let the government encourage us to fight over the scraps and carcass of a failing nation.