Apologize in advance for the long ramble. This is just my opinion as someone that worked part time in the stores in late 90's and early 2000's plus did an internship with their IT department and part time at corporate office for a bit after college until I got a full time job...
Back when Ron Pearson and even Rick Jurgens to some extent were running Hy-Vee they were a lot more calculated with their expansion and what new areas they were going to venture into while making sure not to sacrifice the basic principles the company was good at. Some of you all may remember the Heartland Pantry gas stations back in the days, that was a subsidiary of Hy-Vee but it was so poorly run and not profitable that Hy-Vee sold it off and got out of the gas station business for awhile. Then they started back up years later with a few Hy-Vee gas stations and grew that out slowly and now you see the Fast and Fresh gas stations popping up all over the place with Randy running the show. I was part of the part time staff that opened up the West Lakes store just down the street from the corporate offices. At that time that was their new flagship store and anything new they wanted to experiment/test out before they started rolling it out across the chain they would pilot in that store and we saw things that flopped and we saw some things that were really popular and since corporate offices were just a stone's throw down the street they were able to get good feedback. Again, under that era of leadership they were calculated with anything they were going to add to their stores and just didn't do massive expansions or widespread changes in a short period of time.
At the time a lot of the people at the corporate offices had worked in the stores previously and worked their way into those jobs at the corporate offices so you had people with a lot of front line experience running the operations now. I know in the IT department at the time some of our college interns probably were more technically savvy than some of the people there and even had 1 of the managers tell a few of us over beers one night they could probably hire a few of us to replace some people and we'd be significantly better than some of the people they've had working there for years but Hy-Vee at the time tended to reward loyalty so didn't matter if 1 of us could run circles around someone that had been doing an IT role for 10 years there, they only would hire on if they created new roles or someone left so taking a job there was never much of an option for most of the interns because at the time they just weren't growing as fast to have a need for it.
To me now nearly 20 years removed from working in any capacity at Hy-Vee but still know a few of the folks both at the store and corporate that I run into occasionally I think Randy has just changed the culture too much too fast there and tried to grow it out too much too fast. What made Hy-Vee what it was is the service not the all the stores with the bells and whistles and "one stop shop" that almost makes them trying to emulate retailers like Wal-Mart. It's become obvious that their partnership with Wahlburgers is not successful and I would love to see the financials on the stupid things they added like the exercise equipment, shoes, and nail salons as can't imagine they are doing great either. They are getting to a point they need to scale back and get back to doing what made them the successful company they were and be more calculated with their new ventures. Bigger is not always better.
