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To enter the company headquarters of Penn Traffic, the East Coast grocery chain, executives must cross a covered, glassed-in walkway. Down below, Penn Traffic’s warehouse operation is in full swing. Semis back up to docking bays, forklifts pivot, turn, and speed away, and warehouse workers prepare pallets for stacking. While the executives and their white-collar subordinates—secretaries, accountants, computer-types, and temporary clerical workers like me—take the elevated walkway across to the offices, blue-collar workers down below have a separate entrance around back, through high chain-link gates. So well-insulated are the executives’ offices that all one can ever hear from below is the rare muffled shout, the faint sound of something very heavy dropping, and that steady, vaguely ominous beep that trucks and forklifts make when going in reverse. Yet in the summer of 1966, the executives above were trying desperately listen to the world down below. They did so in the only way they knew how: with a professionally conducted survey.

Penn Traffic was in trouble. “The long view over the last three years has not been a good one, quite frankly,” company spokesman Marc Jampole put it at the time, in what passes for disarming forthrightness in PR circles. Quite frankly, Penn Traffic had one foot in the grave. The company’s saga followed an all-too-familiar storyline: New York City investment firm with no experience in the grocery business orchestrates buy-out with junk bond financing. Strategies begin to look misguided once the debt starts creeping up and the effects of the champagne wear off. In 1955, the company posts losses of $79.6 million. In November of that year, it decides now might not be a good time to build new stores. In January 1996, some of the stores ask union employees to accept a 10 percent pay cut. The union accepts. In September of that year, Standard & Poor’s lowers the company’s credit rating, warning investors off. Shares in the company, which traded on the New York Stock Exchange for $45 in 1993, slide to and remain stuck in the low single-digits. All other indices of the company’s welfare—cash flow, revenue, sales per square foot—seem locked in a tailspin.

At this exceedingly iffy moment in the company’s history, executives at Penn Traffic decided it was a great time to find out what their workers were thinking about. They hired a consumer research company to survey their 27,000 employees. With so much going so sour at Penn Traffic and with the company’s workers surely hearing and reading the bad news most every night, perhaps a survey seemed like the least expensive and most hassle-free method to appear concerned and communicate that eager, can-do, wrong-righting energy. Surely executives didn’t actually believe that dim spirits and low morale lay at the heart of the company’s woes. It wasn’t the sackers and cashiers who accumulated all that debt.

It was also at this moment that the temp agency I’d been working for off and on, three days here, three days there, called me and told me to report to Penn Traffic’s department of human resources to read the survey responses.

John Pierce, the director of human resources, showed me to a desk stacked high with paper and surrounded by boxes filled with more paper. Closed boxes lined the carpeted partitions of the cubicle and were wedged tightly underneath the desk, supporting it on one side. Were it not for the computer shoved into the corner, the cubicle might have been pre-Dickensian. The boxes stacked along the top bulged at the sides, the weight of their contents crushing the tops of the cartoons below. Someone with the flair for triple-digit font size had labeled the boxes with a magic marker. They read “Big Bear,” “Quality,” “Riverside,” and “Insalaco,” words and near-words which meant absolutely nothing to me then and which I wrongly took to be code names for some project or other.

These papers, Pierce told me, with a slight note of pride, comprised every single response to a single question of the professionally conducted survey. As he told me about the survey (very costly for the company, the results very important) and filled me in on the basics (half hour for lunch, come get me if you have any questions, or, better yet, ask my secretary), Pierce stepped over to one of the open boxes, reached in and pulled out bunches of the responses, rubber-banded together in groups of roughly a hundred. He riffled through the pages a couple of times and then quickly dropped them back into the box. A few of the surveys were already in a modest stack by the computer, the rubber band off, a sure sign that some temp, some other Bartleby preferring not to, was here before me and had quit or been fired in the middle of things.

The question that I was to spend the next six weeks pondering was Part B of the “Optional Comments Section” and what’s known pedagogically as your free response type question: “what are your suggestions for the way employees should be recognized or rewarded for providing excellent service to customers?” Seems simple enough. The catch was that Pierce and Penn Traffic wanted the responses quantified. After I questioned Pierce about what he meant exactly by “quantified” and ascertained that he didn’t, as I hoped, mean “summarize”—he wanted numbers only—I settled in among the pages and began to read the responses in earnest.

Some of the quantifying wasn’t nearly as messy as I had originally feared. If an employee wrote “I want a raise for my excellent customer service,” I would simply chalk another one up in the “raise” column of my ever-expanding spreadsheet. And each time I can across a response reading, “Money talks, bullshit walks”—I cannot tell you how many times I read some version of that sentence—I felt I was honoring the letter of the response when I added another vote for the Party of the Raise. As for the spirit of nearly all the responses—that, regrettably, fell between the long columns of my spreadsheet.

But the surveys required judgment calls, and each nettlesome judgment call revealed some serious conceptual flaw with my spreadsheet. I had expanded it to nineteen hopelessly general categories—profit-sharing, bonus, extra break during the day, special parking space, scheduling consideration, personal letter, just say thanks, and so forth—and I knew there was plenty else that the employees had written that could never be expressed in numbers. How to count the respondent who wrote: “One day during the winter, we were having really bad weather, and a few employees got merit awards for coming to work. If getting a merit award requires you to risk death just to go to a low-paying job, then something here is pretty messed up!” I believe I counted this as a vote for making sure all merit programs are fair. But soon as I resolved one dicey response, another turned up: “Our employee appreciation day consisted of two bags of Food Club pretzels, one bag of Food Club chips and five bottles of Insalaco’s soda. It was thrown in the breakroom.” Is that a yea for more soda? A nay for Food Club brand snacks? I added one harsh mark to the “dinner/picnic” category and continued on. Common sense told me all the responses read like votes for better jobs, but that wasn’t the question the survey was asking.

As I made my way through the pages, time after time I came across category-busting responses. There was a long narrative about the favoritism shown to the head meat cutter at Store 65, who supposedly whiles the hours away in the manager’s office, leaving the respondent and others to pick up his slack and take customers for meat and seafood. I wished that I could somehow find the questionnaire from this head meat cutter at Store 65 and discard it, uncounted. But the only thing that counted was my counting, and my counting was flawed by the impossibility of quantifying frustration.

I couldn’t do justice to the employees’ sense that the survey was a futile waste of money—as many pointed out, hazarding guesses as to its cost—because nobody was asking about frustration. All Penn Traffic was interested in hearing about was the narrowly circumscribed matter of rewarding employees for excellent customer service. “Keep promoting, recognizing, and rewarding the suck asses,” one employee wrote. “This includes the ones that sleep their way up.” I slotted this response with others under “Any reward system needs to be fair.” Another employee wrote, “In one department in our store we had two employees from a juvenile delinquency home, a recovering crack addict, and a thief.” It was decided—with everything the passive voice implies—that the co-worker of the recovering addict counted under my most general category of all, store relations.

I was reading the complaints, word for word all of them, but they weren’t going anywhere beyond me, and the little scraps of paper onto which I transcribed what they’d written, scraps of paper that I folded in half and tucked into my shirt pocket every day before leaving. Barely an hour into my task, its absurdity was obvious: I was a $7.25-an-hour temp, reading and analyzing—excuse me, quantifying—the anger and frustration of people I didn’t know, employed in a business I knew nothing about, for the benefit of managers determined to ignore the results.

When I ran out of paper to read, I totaled up my spreadsheet, tabulating both store-wide subtotals and company-wide totals, condensed my findings into a brisk, short-paragraphed, bullet-ridden, nine page report and submitted it to Pierce. I sat at the edge of his desk, looking at the photographs of airplanes on the wall (Pierce was an amateur pilot) and waiting until he read what I wrote. I was somewhat nervous about how he’d receive my “Concluding Remarks” section:

I will end this report as many of the employees ended their responses. I hope you read what we wrote they said. I hope you actually read these and something comes of them. It’s not necessary to read all the responses as I did. To learn what the employees are thinking, it’s not even necessary to read all the responses from your particular store of your area of responsibility. But still, a portion of these should be required reading, for everyone. Take a dozen or two dozen of the responses, pick them at random, and read them. The numbers and my report cannot adequately represent and do justice to the employees’ emotions. Your employees are not simply mad or happy, unsatisfied or satisfied. They are not for a raise or for pins and pens. Many are frustrated; yes, but hopeful that they won’t always be.

When he finished, he looked up at me, appearing immensely tired all of a sudden. “Now you know how things are here,” he said. I agreed, not sure where he was going with this. Now I must kill you? He reminded me that I alone had read all the responses to the question on rewards for excellent customer service. I returned a vague platitude about how I couldn’t pretend to understand the grocery business after reading these, but I thought I had a better appreciation for the work. For a long moment pierce stared down at the report in front him. Then he flipped through the pages once more, looked up at me, and asked if there was any way I could make the report shorter. The executives who will get this are very busy, he told me somewhat apologetically, then stressing that this report would fall on the desks of the company’s highest officials. Pierce worried that he was liable to lose them after five pages. I told him I guessed I could single-space it.

A number of months and a few other, less interesting temp jobs later, I read in April that Penn Traffic had hired a new CEO, one Phil Hawkins. As the Syracuse Herald American piquantly described it, Hawkins was charged with “creating a map to steer Penn Traffic out of its stormy financial waters.” Like the previous regime, Hawkins put great emphasis on “listening.” Listening to customers, listening to employees, listening to everyone and learning what they have to teach. He traveled to individual stores to meet with Penn Traffic’s employees in what were billed as “Heart of the Matter” seminars, meetings that one reporter described as “emotion-drenched.” In an interview with the Syracuse paper, Hawkins offered a peek at what went on at the Heart meetings. “We talk about a culture that we’re trying to bring to the company,” he said. “The culture is really one of managing from the heart.” No longer would Penn Traffic be one of those top-down, dictatorial grocery chains. According to Hawkins, formerly demoralized employees were “empowered” by his seminars. Asked to explain something called “change exercises,” a component of the Heart seminars, Hawkins elaborated at length:

It’s actually a little exercise where everybody in the room stands up, looks at each other, and the other person has to turn around and you have to change six things about yourself real quick and see how fast the other person can notice it. And once you go through the change, then you say, okay, now do you think you can live with that change? Or, take one of the more difficult changes that you did, do you think you can live with that change throughout the rest of the day?

I was probably more interested in Hawkins and his quest to build the grocery store with a human face and a great big heart than most people in Syracuse. In fact, I’ll wager I was the only person outside of the Hawkins family who was clipping articles about him. I wanted to know what his new emphasis on listening would mean in light of what I’d read in the survey responses. Sure, I was skeptical of the Heart of the Matter seminars. No, I didn’t want to experiment with any change exercises on myself. Still, hadn’t I recommended much the same course in my report, perhaps without all that truly execrable Personal Empowerment language? Maybe I wouldn’t have phrased things just the way Hawkins did, but still I wanted to give Hawkins the benefit of the doubt. Until I saw his ads.

The ads were abbreviated Heart Seminars set to uplifting music and carried along on gritty, verité camerawork. Hawkins held forth among the gathered. He worked the room like Tony Robbins without all the distracting glow and gleam, and his speeches blended equal parts corporate pep talk, promises of a better tomorrow, New Age bromides, and good old-fashioned ass-chewing. He was a marked contrast to Roy Flood, one of the managers he replaced. Flood wore a full suit in ads and only rarely appeared in the frame with workers. Standing among the bounty of modern agri-business’s year-round growing season and tossing an apple into the air, Flood looked as if he hadn’t handled produce before. Where Flood was old, not what you’d call trim, and balding, Hawkins was new and improved—younger, trim, and less balding. With his tie loosened and his coat presumably in the car or over his chair or maybe even at home, Hawkins talked to the employees about his vision of the new grocery store.

And these were real employees, as Penn traffic took pains to point out in news accounts of the ads. The people nodding their heads, smiling, looking pleased with what they were hearing were actual employees of Penn Traffic. The ads prominently showed one woman crying, dabbing the corners of her eyes with a tissue. This transparent ploy prompted the New Times, the local alternative newsweekly and nobody’s fool, to speculate that the tears had somehow been faked. But they were real enough. It’s just that nobody imagined what kind of workplace, what levels of frustration, what history of indignities, might lead a person to cry during what amounts to a simple business meeting.

Of course, she could have been crying out of boredom. In one ad, Hawkins suggests that Penn Traffic will save lots of money with a more inexpensive kind of bag and thus be able to pass that savings right along to the customers. In the audience, there are solemn nods all around. In another ad, Hawkins says the company will never again require shoppers to carry cards in order to receive a discount. Wide smiles. Did he really say never? In a third, Hawkins pulls out all the stops and decrees that no one will ever ask customers to present a receipt in order to make a return. The employees in the ads applaud politely, and the background music rises around them and then quickly fades as the grocery store’s logo appears above the new motto: “All we did was listen.”

Listen to whom? Now, nobody can seriously expect a commercial to show the chief executive listening to the cashier whose response to the survey described having to do price checks herself rather than ask for help. “I’m not being insensitive,” she wrote, “but ... many employees lack reading skills. Rather than embarrass them, I’ll have to leave the register and do it myself.” There’s a set of problems that can’t be addressed in thirty months, let alone thirty seconds. It was hard for me to watch the ads and not think about the responses I had read. One reasonable, seemingly simple request read in part:

We would like to receive our pay in actual checks rather than vouchers that must be cashed at the service desk. This is an archaic practice that most companies abandoned decades ago. My family and friends have a difficult time believing this is how I am paid, and I find it insulting to have my pay counted out in front of other employees, to say nothing of any customer who happens to be standing there. This is a private matter and should remain just that.

The listening that really mattered, though, was not that of some warm-hearted CEO, but ours in the audience. Even if Hawkins believed with all his heart in his Heart of the Matter seminars and his change exercises—and I suspect he did—ultimately, the seminars were for the benefit of potential shoppers and investors. After all, news reports of Penn Traffic’s near-death may have been widespread, but they weren’t exaggerated. The doubters’ minds needed easing. So the ads called together businessmen and businesswomen everywhere within hearing range of a TV and designated every single one of them an armchair CEO. Owners of stocks, mutual funds, and bonds, amateur investors, and even those who merely prick up their ears as the news anchors read the day’s closing on stocks of local interest—all received engraved reservations for seats at the boardroom table and were invited guests at the company’s meetings, because they understood, they knew about cost-cutting measures and savings. They were conversant in business and shared the culture’s values.

Not that the ad campaign helped Penn Traffic at all. In August 1998, the company held in excess of $1.4 billion in debt. Shares, which traded on the New York Stock Exchange for $45 in 1993, now traded over-the-counter, often for less than a dollar, and never for more than single-digits. After serving as CEO for one year and five months, Phil Hawkins abruptly resigned in August 1998. In November, the company hired Joseph Fisher. To commemorate the new beginning, Fisher struck an optimistic pose in the produce department of one of the grocery stores, and a newspaper photographer obligingly made it official. Even surrounded by bright red, green, and yellow vegetables, Fisher was the freshest, newest thing in the frame. Probably few readers of the newspaper recalled or even cared that just over a year before, Hawkins had posed for a nearly identical photograph. The produce department is a kind of coronation site for Penn Traffic CEOs fresh off the trucks and unpacked from their crates.

Not long after Fisher’s ascension, a new television ad campaign began. “It’s Gotta Be_______(fill in name of grocery store here)” is the new motto, eclipsing in the public’s memory both “All We Did Is Listen” and the creepy previous slogan, “We Really Are Your Closest Friend.” But curiously, the corporate memory was also on the fritz. When I contacted company PR man Marc Jampole about taking a look at Penn Traffic’s history over the last few years, beginning with that moment the company surveyed all its employees to get a sense of where it stood and what could be done to make the changes that needed changing and solve the problems that needed solving, he was less than enthusiastic about talking on those terms.

He did want to talk about Joseph Fisher, however; Fisher, I learned, was going to turn things at Penn Traffic around with his proven recipe of good merchandise, the right mix of sales and specials, and excellent customer service. “We won’t discuss Phil,” Jampole said. Months before, he had refused my request for a videotape of the Hawkins TV ads. A week later, I learned that Hawkins resigned, taking his motto, his seminars, and presumably his managing from the heart with him. When I pointed out that the survey I was curious about had actually been conducted and completed before the arrival of Hawkins, Jampole said that given all the “change and turmoil” Penn Traffic has gone through, it didn’t make sense to look back that many years. “For us,” said Jampole, “the beginning point is Joe Fisher.”

UPDATE, JANUARY 2012: Penn Traffic filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November of 1998. In early 2011, it sold its assets to the New York-based grocery chain Tops Friendly Markets. In August of that year, the Federal Trade Commission ordered Tops to sell seven of the stores it had acquired because, according to the FCC website, “acquisition of the bankrupt Penn Traffic Company supermarket chain was anticompetitive.” Due to the moribund market, Tops has not been able to divest itself of all the stores.

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