Sheetz Against the Machine
What some companies are doing right
In recent essays, we have explored topics such as “bullshit jobs,” quiet quitting, and the evolving relationship between employees and employers. Much has been said about disengaging work and workplaces that reduce human beings to mere cogs in a machine. Much of what drives quiet quitting is the sense that jobs lack any real engagement, and workplaces that treat human beings like nothing more than cogs in a wheel of the Machine.
At the same time, we’ve been reflecting on how the Savage Collective can be more than just a critique of the Machine and its ways. We want to highlight people and practices that are working to create positive change for working-class Americans within a culture often marked by devastation. Last week, we featured the Mill Hunk Journal as an example of bottom-up cultural creation—pushing back against the Machine’s tendency to dictate culture from above.
We believe that even within the corporate world, some companies push back against the worst tendencies of the Machine and offer meaningful, fulfilling work to working-class Americans. Today, I share my own experience with a Pennsylvania-based company I’ve been working for over the past few months—an employer that challenges the norm in a positive way. I’d love to hear about similar businesses in the comments—companies that deserve recognition for doing things differently.
While we do enjoy calling out the Machine here at The Savage Collective, our vision isn’t simply to promote an agrarian or cottage industry economy. We care about practical working conditions for the average worker. While we support localism in its many forms, we recognize that not everyone will find employment in small, local, or self-owned businesses. Given this reality, what makes a company less “Machine-like” than others?
One example is a gas station/convenience store chain that was started in Pennsylvania but now reaches as far as North Carolina and Michigan. Some of you may be familiar with this business called Sheetz. Starting as a single store in 1953 by G. Robert “Bob” Sheetz, the company remains in the Sheetz family to this day. Over this time, they have experienced substantial and sustained growth having well over 700 stores and 25,000+ employees with more being added constantly. Other than fuel and snacks, Sheetz specializes in made-to-order (MTO) food and drinks. They pioneered touchscreen ordering in the 1990’s, way ahead of their time.
I recently began a technician role which involves traveling store to store to maintain and fix all their equipment and building systems. Although they are a large and extremely profitable company, they do set themselves apart as a less Machine-like than many institutions of similar caliber. Here are three things that they do well:
Managers Promoted Within
Sheetz prioritizes promotion of managers from within the company. Although there may be some external managerial hires, most managers that I have encountered started at Sheetz at entry-level positions. One of my own managers started at Sheetz 14 years ago washing windows and now oversees an entire region of technicians.
By the time a manager takes over a store, they have performed every task countless times and understand the ins and outs of procedures, contacts, and equipment. There’s no job on the floor they haven’t done—or wouldn’t still do. In this way, a store manager is measured by their competency rather than a somewhat arbitrary diploma that says 'BS in General Business' (the BS doesn’t mean what you think it means).
Rather than relying on a college degree as a sign of competence, which in most cases is just a rubber stamp anyway, they prioritize talent and work ethic from those they already employ. While they support employees who pursue higher education and offer generous tuition assistance, a degree alone isn’t enough to qualify someone for leadership. This angle on growth and promotion within is vital as it is well-known in the management literature that the establishment of career ladders within a company improves employee engagement, productivity, and retention.
In my experience, many companies practice external management hires and focus too much on degrees. I remember two young guys at Pepsi hired to oversee delivery routing. Fresh out of school with no delivery experience, they were tasked with crafting routes for veteran drivers—some nearly three times their age—operating trucks they couldn’t drive themselves. To many, their degrees signified qualification—but were they?
Training
Sheetz makes much of this internal promotion possible through their extensive training programs. In my own onboarding process, I’ve spent lots of time with experienced company technicians. Many have been with the company for over ten years directly out of high school without any real experience diagnosing and working on equipment. Sheetz has turned many motived window washers and sandwich makers into talented technicians who have acquired not only their EPA certification to work on refrigeration systems, but who are knowledgeable about a vast array of building equipment.
Sheetz has achieved this by developing its own internal curriculum—a sort of in-house trade school. Every technician at Sheetz spends several weeks training at their headquarters in Altoona, PA, where they have examples of all their equipment and even a ‘test store’ for hands-on learning. This training covers everything from kitchen equipment and HVAC systems to computers and gas pumps. Additionally, Sheetz maintains a high-quality YouTube channel featuring instructional videos on servicing equipment and replacing parts
Many businesses attempt to outsource maintenance and repair limiting the scope of what their technicians need to do. Even if the task is light electrical or plumbing work, some outside contractor is called. Unfortunately, this all limits the scope of what their technicians can do. Sheetz has done the opposite. They have increasingly brought aspects of maintenance and production in house, which has the dual benefit of saving money but also increases the skill and agency of the technicians and other employees.
If the trucking industry is shifting towards automatic transmissions and lane guidance systems, then Sheetz is doing the equivalent of teaching their employees to drive a twin-stick Mack without power steering. They fundamentally see their employees as capable and attempt to actively help them expand their capacities.
At The Savage Collective, we’ve long believed that work plays a crucial role in how we develop as human beings throughout our lives. We argue that work that enhances our skills and agency—work that engages our whole selves—is far better than work that strips away any chance for skill or agency development (which we’ve come to call 'bullshit work'). It would benefit more businesses to recognize that crafting skilled, capable employees is a far better strategy than manipulating the system to produce less capable ones. As Matthew Crawford aptly quotes in his brilliant book The World Beyond Your Head, ‘Cheap men need expensive jigs; expensive men need only the tools in their toolbox.
Employee Ownership
Because Sheetz is a privately owned company, they don’t answer to shareholders. This gives them the freedom to prioritize both their customers and employees, rather than a distant, nameless group with no local stake in the game. Every employee at Sheetz receives profit-sharing bonuses. Depending on your role, this can be tied to the performance of your specific store or, in the case of maintenance and other departments, spread across a larger area. Regardless, whether you're overseeing a team or simply emptying the garbage at the pumps, you have a vested interest in the company’s success. Furthermore, employees gain stock in the company over time for merely being there. In this way, every Sheetz employee, besides benefitting from quarterly bonus profit share, is also really part owners of the company. Their success is your success—quite literally.
One of our main complaints about modern work is how it treats people as mere cogs in a machine. Many workers sense this intuitively. They feel far from being partners in the enterprise; instead, they’re just labor units, existing in the workplace until a robot can replace them, and they’re let go. Implementing profit-sharing changes the dynamic between employee and employer. The impact goes beyond just financial—it’s radical and far-reaching for both parties
In his insightful book Lost Connections, Johann Hari suggests that disconnection from work is a major contributor to the modern malaise of most Americans. We have a a lack of agency and vested interest in the activity that makes up over half of our waking hours. “We spend most of our waking lives working,” writes Hari, “and 87 percent of us feel either disengaged or enraged by our jobs.” This sense of anger is apparent in both Anthony and Amelia’s recent pieces on quiet quitting.
But doesn’t have to be this way. Hari himself highlights businesses that are arranged differently like a bike shop in Baltimore in which employees are brought in as apprentices and who, if they stay long enough, become actual financial partners. In this situation, Hari notices a very different temperament. One worker said, “It definitely feels very rewarding when you show up and see the building and don’t think of it as the place where you come in to put your hours, but as the thing you’ve contributed to making.” This sentiment seems to be true of more “democratic” workplaces as Hari points out a famous study that showed businesses that have more of this model, on average, grow four times more than others.
I suspect that the profit shares do not always ensure that every employee senses that they have some ownership of the place. Sometimes emptying garbage cans feels just like emptying garbage cans. But, profit shares are a unique opportunity to give workers some stake in the success of the business. If the company does well, the worker should have some tangible connection to that success. This in reality does far more than to line the wallet of an employee. It helps to show that they matter and it helps provide some meaning to their work.
Our friend Tom N. Ianova argued in the comments section of his last piece that shareholder capitalism is often to blame for bad employment conditions and working environments. “External investors require a Board to exercise fiduciary responsibility,” writes Tom, “and to manage the company in the interest of the shareholder. That immediately subordinates the interests of everyone else from employees to customers, to suppliers and the community… Separating ownership from involvement in a business creates a misalignment of interests between the owners and pretty much everybody else.” Sheetz, however, is still family owned and they are focused primarily on the good of their customers and employees—not some abstract group of investors from some other place.
This list is far from exhaustive. For a large profitable company, Sheetz does lots of things right. I am sure that there are other good companies that have implemented similar programs and initiatives. At core, these principles reflect a certain valuing of the dignity of employees. They trust their employees to act and make decisions without interference from some elevated and detached bureaucracy. Sheetz is a good example of a company who wants competent people on the ground making as many decisions as possible to keep the wheels turning (I suppose literal wheels in this case). While it is rare that I would have high praise for a large company, particularly when working for them, I will give credit where credit is due.
Excellent article. Thank you for sharing!
Nice to see the idea of "common ownership" and "dignity of employees" making the rounds again from the 1970s.