Publix Vision 2000 Pin

Just won this on eBay for a paltry $5.

Yes, a little over a year ago I wrote a piece on the perils of going overboard with looking for 2000 stuff on eBay, but the trick is to find something unique enough to warrant buying or which I have some kind of personal history with.

Case in point, this "Vision 2000" pin. The seller wrote on the auction page that it comes from the Publix supermarket chain in Florida and that it dates to 1991.

Normally, I'd limit my focus from 1995 to 2001, but this was too intriguing to pass up. At first I thought it was some kind of green initiative. Then I did a quick online search, which led me to the 1993 issue of Computerworld magazine on Google Books, which had a feature on Publix and Vision 2000.

"In 1989, the Lakeland, Fla., food retailer embarked on 'Vision 2000,' a huge, long-term effort to boost company sales to $25 billion by the year 2000." That entailed investing around $16 billion to overhaul and streamline the grocery chain's information-services department, described at one time as "hierarchical, inflexible, narrowly-focused, slow-moving and bureaucratic." There was a tech-support department and an information-systems department (referred to as "IS" in the article--I actually had to look it up to make sure it stood for what I thought it stood for!), both of which focused on their own tasks and kept little communication between each other.

The strategy, therefore, was to merge support and systems into one department and get the employees therein to collaborate and share information and skills. With this came ongoing peer reviews. To quote (then?) IS vice-president Daniel Risener, "Peers tend to be more honest, and the employee gets a truer picture of how well he's performing and what areas he needs to improve upon."

Now, I'm not too well-versed in IT stuff, having taken only one sort-of computer class at Moraine Valley. I bring this into the Museum because it's from Publix, and I remember a lot of happy family vacations in Southwest Florida starting in the year 2000...many good memories there. Also, the "streamlining the IS department" focus of the article fits in with the advent of the Internet and the increasingly computer-driven New Millennium.