Steven Burd

I need more personal time and, given my extensive work in health care, I want to pursue that interest further.

care health work time

What we have is a pay structure that, on basic wages, is higher than market rate, as a general statement. When you look at other forms of retail, whether they be food or non-food, we pay more. If you look at our health care benefits, we pay a lot more.

look you health food

You know that a lot of people go to emergency rooms when they don't really need to.

go know you people

The first job I ever had was right here in San Francisco with Southern Pacific.

here right first job

I'm no health care expert, but you've got technology that constantly advances the ability to extend life and maybe improve lifestyle. That puts constant upward pressure on health care costs.

you technology health life

We're trying to take a leadership role in solving the nation's health-care crisis. We want everybody in this country to have health insurance.

nation health leadership country

In our experience at Safeway, we're confident that we can actually improve the quality of health care while taking costs down and using the savings to help finance coverage of low-income people who are clearly going to need help to pay for insurance.

quality experience health people

We're a high-volume, low-margin business, so we decided to reinvent our own approach to health care.

own care health business

We've been paying for 100 percent of preventive care. But if you're not getting annual physicals, then you're not going to gain a financial incentive, so effectively your insurance premium with us will go up.

will go you care

The most challenging part of being CEO is communicating to 200,000 people what you want done.

you done want people

The first person a customer speaks with has the greatest impact on that customer's impression of Safeway.

customer person impression impact

People like to work for a winner.

like winner work people

If the store were your own business, you'd escort the customer to a product's location in the store and refer to the customer by name.

customer name you business

There are very few people that I've met in business that I would actually say were charismatic, elizabeth HolmesSafeway was clearly charismatic. Elizabeth HolmesSafeway was very smart. And Elizabeth HolmesSafeway was doing one of the hardest things you can do in business and that is to create an enterprise from scratch.

I was bothered by it, I was disappointed, it seemed plausible. It just seemed like one more delay for us.

We often weren't given a lot of explanation for that and I kept asking' give me some details here. Maybe we can help. We're a big company with lots of resources.' That was the frustrating part. We always tried to help them in any way that we could.

It was a fascinating concept.

I've never seen that done.