Last summer, late June to be exact I was out and about interviewing for various internships, and thanks to the likes of Brian Bailey, I was able to land a job with the IS&S department of a Fortune 500 company: The Kroger Corp. Yes, it came as a surprise to myself as well… Kroger really is a Fortune 500 company.
This past Tuesday, we had our annual report meeting (I’m sure it had some more official sounding name) and basically it was all the big guys stand up on stage acting all goofy while all the associates (thousands of us) sat there wanting to hear about the yearly bonus. So there’s a set bonus, then depending on how well the company did that year, you get a percent of it, this year it was about 149% (everyone was indeed a little giddy after the meeting) However, for students like myself, who could really use the bonus… well, no such luck for interns.
Here are a few interesting facts I learned at the meeting… I believe all this information was released that morning in New York… so don’t go running with the thoughts of insider information.

• Kroger brought in 66 Billion Dollars over the past year (P&G brought in 68)
• Kroger made out with 1.1 Billion Dollars profit over the past year (P&G brought in around 8.8 I think)
• Kroger has 300,000 employees (P&G… who knows)
• Wal-mart is number one in the market of food sales (but only because they sacrifice service for price) Kroger at no. 2 <– Pretty sure
• Head honchos of big corporations will do nearly anything (or so it seems) to keep the attention of their audience

I have to hand it to the guys though, it was a fairly easy going 2 hours of being squashed into a place that should have been holding about 3/4’s of what it was.

I do love my job though, I am making great money while going to school full time and Kroger does everything in its power to keep me hired on. Once exams are done this week, I will be working Full-time at Kroger until late September. Then at that time I’ll go back to working 15ish hours a week. I sit in my cube and program all day long… what’s more fun than that??? Yeah, I know, not for everyone, but I enjoy it a lot.

I feel like these first few posts that I’ve been giving you are more informational on my life than entertaining. I fully expect that to change in the near future. I just want readers to have a ground base on who they’re reading from, before completely blowing me off for bad grammar and awkward sentences (thanks Firefox for fixing my spelling!)

One more exam tomorrow (Digital System Design) then its St. Paddy’s Day! Woot! Have a good one, and keep your stick on the ice… (we’re all in this together)