At 5 o’clock Thursday, a gaggle of Market Basket employees walked out of their Storrs Street store. They were heading to Red River Theatres to re-experience the summer that they – along with 25,000 other employees – walked off the job to win back their CEO, Arthur T. Demoulas.
The group joined several dozen Market Basket employees who watched exclusive screenings of Food Fight: Inside the Battle for Market Basket Thursday night. The full-length documentary, made by Exeter filmmaker Jay Childs, will be playing for the general public at Red River Theatres beginning today through May 5.
The 7 p.m. showtime today will be followed by a discussion with Childs and Market Basket employees.
On Thursday, as he walked across the supermarket parking lot toward the theater, Market Basket employee of 22 years Wayne Curtiss talked about what he expected.
“Kind of reliving the moment,” he said. “And praying that we never go through it again.”
The beginning of the documentary captured what that “it” was: Arthur T. Demoulas being ousted by his cousin, Arthur S. Demoulas, on June 23, 2014; employee strikes and rallies and customer boycotts and empty store shelves; and a summer of uncertainty for thousands of employees working for the New England grocery chain.
Ed Sweeney, who’s worked for Market Basket for 37 years and is currently the dairy manager for the Storrs Street store, said Thursday he was just interested to watch what happened the summer of 2014 as he “held down the fort” at his own store.
“Maybe there’s something I missed along the way,” Sweeney said. “But after 37 years, I think we know most of it.”
Food Fight made an effort to go deep into the store’s history and character to explain the split in family ownership and to show why workers were so upset when Arthur T. was taken out.
It documented how, under Arthur T., many workers start as teenagers and are still working there years later. It examined the way the store’s environment rewards hard work and expects employees to be professional. And it took time to illustrate examples of Market Basket taking care of its employees, like helping one truck driver finance the purchase of a home.
And then Food Fight gets to the meat of the story: the board tilting balance to allow Arthur S. to take control of the business, the ousting of Arthur T., and then the massive fallout with employees and customers.
In particular, Childs’s film emphasized the risk the upper-level management employees took when, after being fired, led what has been called the largest non-unionized labor strike in U.S. history.
Brian Boucher, the Storrs Street Market Basket store manager and employee of 39 years, went to seven rallies during the summer of 2014.
“I attended all the rallies . . . during those hot summer months,” Boucher said just before entering the movie theater Thursday. He was visible in one of the film’s shots, right in front of a massive crowd. “It was to show some support.”
While he said he was there to show solidarity, he felt those who led the fight were the heroes.
“The people that really stuck their necks out there were the main office people,” said Boucher. “They were unemployed for six weeks. We still came to work everyday, we got a paycheck every week.”
As the fight dragged on, the documentary showed the increasingly ingenious ways the leading Market Basket employees found ways to slow down business. After asking customers to boycott the stores, managers stopped ordering most of their stock, they blocked delivery trucks from the loading docks, they had just one employee – as opposed to a team – unload the trucks.
And then they sent workers to go strike down at the Tewksbury, Mass., Market Basket headquarters. While the film showed how impressively dedicated employees were to showing up, walking picket lines and standing up for Arthur T., it also showed the less desirable aspects: cussing out and, in some cases, threatening, those still going to work at the headquarters.
Employees in the audience Thursday chuckled at some of the more innappropriate lines.
As the documentary continued, Food Fight also put a spotlight on the sadness and at some points, hopelessness that Market Basket employees were feeling about their jobs and their work family.
Perhaps the most difficult time was when part-time workers were laid off in the later part of the summer.
As she left the theater following the end of the film, Ashley Barr said that segment caused her to become emotional. “It brought back a lot of memories,” she said.
Barr, who has been working at the Storrs Street store for six years, added, “My hours were always getting cut during the week. I think as soon as they mentioned the temporary layoffs, I started getting teary eyed.”
James Berkey, a Concord resident and former Swanzey Market Basket store employee for eight years, said, “I had a family so I had to go to a competitor.” He hasn’t gone back – it was a second job for him – though he said if his budget allowed him to get by on the wages, he would.
At a point of the summer of 2014 – and at a point in the documentary – when it wasn’t expected, an agreement was reached on Aug. 27 between Arthur S. and Arthur T. Demoulas. The latter bought out the grocery chain for $1.5 billion.
The last few minutes of Food Fight show the celebration and the recovery. After it was over, however, Storrs Street employee of 33 years Brenda Averill said she felt like the last segment didn’t capture how quickly the stores bounced back.
“They got the gist of it,” she said. “There was a whole lot more.”
Her manager, Brian Boucher, said, “Pretty much from day one until we came back Labor Day weekend, that first week in September, it was pretty much business as usual.”
Averill was also disappointed more stores – including the two Concord locations – weren’t shown in the documentary.
“It would have been nice to see diversity,” she said.
Former employee Berkey did point out that the film did get to the heart of the matter: why Market Basket survived the battle.
The employees, he said, “Don’t do it because they have to. They do it because they want to. They want to work because they love Market Basket.”
(Elodie Reed can be reached at 369-3306, ereed@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @elodie_reed.)