Guys and Dollars: Joe Calvano is the Dollar Giant
The incredible true story of Joe Calvano, the golden boy who grabbed life by the tails and bet it all on a dollar store.
This is the implausible story of Joe Calvano, an unemployed 49-year-old who borrowed money to open a little dollar store in Burnaby in 2002, getting his wife to run the cash register. Five years later, Calvano has 55 Dollar Giant stores in five provinces, 1,000 employees and revenues exceeding $70 million – and nothing in any of his stores sells for more than a loonie. Can success like this really happen? Maybe so, if you believe life can be like an over-the-top Hollywood musical. This one might be entitled How to Succeed in Business with Only One Dollar.
The curtain rises on a young Calvano hitting the streets in search of employment. It’s 1973 and Calvano has just dropped out of college when he lands a job in the stockroom of a Kresge’s store in Toronto. Kresge’s is a five-and-dime department-store chain: low-end retail. For most people, sweeping floors and schlepping stock would be like starting life in a dead end. Not for the young Calvano. He loves it. He’s earning $80 a week and vows to run the company one day.
“It’s a way to learn the business and get paid for it,” Calvano tells me, 34 years later in another stockroom, this one behind his Dollar Giant headquarters on Main Street in Vancouver. Calvano appears fresh-faced, still enthusiastic and surprised by his life. What the musical needs next is the mentor. Enter Sy Cumiskey, Kresge’s VP of personnel. Cumiskey takes a liking to the kid. Tells the stock boy, “That’s how I started. Stick with it, kid. You can really make a career here. Get your own store, you can make $28,000.” Twenty-eight thousand! Calvano couldn’t be more excited if Cumiskey had just proved there’s a Santa.
Cumiskey takes Calvano under his wing. The kid gets promoted. Now he’s a trainee in lingerie, learning how to order slips and bras and set up displays. The perk, of course, is that he’s working with all the cute shopgirls. It would make for a better dramatic arc if Calvano were to meet his true love here, but he’s already married. No matter, the kid works hard. The dialogue’s hokey but completely genuine. “I think retail is the best business people can get into,” he says today, just as I’m sure he did back then. “If you’re good at it and make yourself valuable, you’re going to get paid for it.”
Before long, Calvano’s promoted to the big store, the giant that owns Kresge’s in Canada: Kmart, the 100,000-square-foot big box. He gets his own department: he’s “domestics” manager, in charge of linens, bed and bath, flowers and housewares. Calvano is climbing, rising through the hierarchy. Today he’s the first to tell you: “You can’t get to the top right away. You have to work at it.” There should be a song about that, something full of optimism – “I Believe in You” or “High Hopes.”
Calvano moves up: senior assistant, coordinating department manager, co-manager. Finally, he gets his own store – his very own 6,000-square-foot Kresge’s and $28,000 a year, just as Cumiskey promised.
But there’s one catch. The little Kresge’s at Dufferin and Sinclair streets in Toronto was once run by the president of Kresge’s and each of the seven managers who followed in his footsteps failed. When it’s handed over to Calvano, the store is a money loser. Mike Clarke, the feisty president, tells the new boy, “We haven’t had a good manager here since I ran it.”
Most first-time managers in the chain are in their late 30s or early 40s. Calvano is 26. It has taken him only four-and-a-half years to climb from stock boy to store manager. It’s a
phenomenal rise; Calvano is a golden boy.
On his first morning, a lump in his throat, Calvano begins a ritual he will follow throughout his career: he walks the store before staff arrives, planning what needs to be done that day – cleaning up this department, changing displays in that department, re-shelving stock, bringing product in from the stockroom. That first morning, like every morning that follows, Calvano makes a point of visiting every employee as they begin their shift, personally giving them directions for the day. And at the end of the shift, he acknowledges what they’ve accomplished and wishes them goodnight. It is a secret of successful management culled from his Kmart days.
“The biggest weakness for most managers is that they think they’re the only ones who know how to do things, and they ignore their employees,” Calvano explains today in the Dollar Giant stockroom. “I don’t try to do everything myself. Everyone who works in the store participates in the store.”
Calvano works what he calls his “passion for retail” on the sales floors with customers, learning about what they like. Knowing their preferences, he orders products carefully from head office. In the first year, he turns the store around and makes a profit. By the time he is promoted again a few years later, his little Kresge’s is the most profitable it has ever been. This is where you’d stage a big production number, with lots of dancing and cash registers ringing.
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