ANNALS OF PRIVATE SECTOR ACHIEVEMENT: The inside story of what it took to keep a Texas grocery chain running in the chaos of Hurricane Harvey.

One of my stores, we had 300 employees; 140 of them were displaced by the flooding. So how do you put your store back together quickly? We asked for volunteers in the rest of the company. We brought over 2,000 partners from Austin, San Antonio, the Rio Grande Valley. They hopped into cars and they just drove to Houston. They said, we’re here to help. It’s shitty work. For 18 hours a day, they’re going to help us restock and then they’ll go sleep on the couch at somebody’s house. . . .

Folks are volunteering to do it because they want to be part of the process. The last hurricane we had, Hurricane Ike in 2008, when it was all over, we asked folks: What can we do to thank you? They said: Can you make a pin that can we put onto our badge to commemorate that we were part of this? I said, I think we can make a pin. . . .

If you think about toilet paper, we’ve called Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark, and we said: Send entire trailer loads directly to our stores. One store will take half a trailer, and the other store will take the other half. You can just bypass our warehouse, so you can just get it to us. In doing that, I create more capacity in my distribution chain. So, you send direct trucks — here are the stores you can go to — and split the truck: make it half paper towels and half toilet tissue. . . .

I do the commercials for H-E-B in Houston, so people know who I am. So, as I walked in the store, people would come up and hug me and thank us for making the effort to open because the Kroger across the street wasn’t open. The Walmart down the street wasn’t open. One woman walked up and started crying and she hugged me to thank us for being open.

You’re amazed at the innate good in people. People will rally to a cause to help out their fellow human beings. This time, maybe even more so than ever before.

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