BROOKINGS – “My goal is to be a store director in Brookings, S.D., until I retire,” said Tom Daschel, new man at the helm at Hy-Vee. “I really like being at the store level. I have no desire for a corporate position at Hy-Vee. This is really where I want to be. This is a great place to raise a family.

“I’m extremely happy. I left here 20 years ago, and I’ve been trying to get back here forever.”

Daschel, 45, the youngest of seven children, was born in Aberdeen. When he was 8-weeks-old, his parents moved to Sioux Falls, where he grew up, worked for Hy-Vee and graduated from Lincoln High School.

Next came South Dakota State University and graduation with a business, economics and accounting degree in 1994. While there he met his wife, Stacy, a farm girl from the Wolsey area. She graduated in December 1996 with a degree in horticulture. Tom and Stacy have two children: Jonathan, 2, and Kaitlyn, 5.

One part of Sioux Falls that Daschel brought with him when he came to SDSU was his membership in the Hy-Vee family. He was 16 years old and a high school student when he started his Hy-Vee career at the store on South Sycamore Avenue.

During his first year at SDSU he continued to work at the Sioux Falls store on weekends.

Staying with Hy-Vee

His second year, in 1991, he transferred to the Brookings store. While he liked the work at Hy-Vee, he never thought of carving out a career in the grocery business. But then came graduation and an offer that changed his life.

Then Brookings Hy-Vee director Doug Dell and assistant director Jim Simmons had a sit-down chat with Daschel and asked him what his future plans were.

“I told them that I was looking for a full-time job, but I didn’t know what I want to do,” Daschel said. “They asked me if I had ever thought of Hy-Vee as a career.”

He admitted he hadn’t, telling them, “I thought it was a good part-time job until I find out what I want to do someday.”

The two men explained to the new graduate “the opportunities that are out there.” He decided to give it a shot.

“They promoted me to a full-time assistant manager job. I’d really done all the duties, so it was a pretty easy transition.”

Daschel stayed in Brookings until early 1997. Then came the Yankton Hy-Vee as assistant director. After that his first assignment as a store director came in Overland Park, Kan. Not quite two years later, he moved again to a Hy-Vee store in Sioux City, Iowa.

Now 20 years later he’s back in Brookings. “This is the only store I really wanted to be at,” Daschel reiterated. “This is where my family plans on calling home for the rest of our days.

“We’re excited to get back involved with South Dakota State. We’re basketball fans; we’re football fans. We look forward to going to those games. It’s the community. My wife grew up on farm near a small town.

“We’ve been at Sioux City for 13 years, and we never lived in Sioux City. We always lived in a smaller town around Sioux City; because that’s where my wife and I always felt more comfortable.”

Up the ladder

Asked what it was about the Hy-Vee chain of stores that attracted him to devote 29 years of his life after starting out at 16 years old, Daschel answered simply and succinctly.

“I’m a people person. It was my first job as a part-time kid. I liked the work. I liked being with customers and helping them out.

“Hy-Vee always gave me different responsibilities. If you worked hard, they’d give you another responsibility. I always liked getting another responsibility and doing something different.”

As he was working his way up the ladder in the Hy-Vee system, those added and different responsibilities came via “on-the-job training. They put you in charge of bread. I’ve worked in frozen, … in dairy, … in produce, … at customer service.

“I kind of worked in all the departments as a part-timer. I got a well-rounded overview of all the different operations of the store as a part-time kid.”

Daschel did note that the corporation had a variety of “training books, one for every department.”

Now on-the-job training has been replaced by “Hy-Vee University.”

“It’s almost like going to college,” Daschel explained. “It’s a lot more structured than what I had. Corporate is involved. The highest training is called a ‘master of retail operations.’ That’s where Hy-Vee pulls (people) out of your store for a whole year. They go to corporate for a week and learn about a department and then they’re assigned to a store somewhere: like one of our best bakeries. They go there and work for three weeks under one of our best bakery managers.

“They have to fill out a book. They take the book back and it’s graded by the bakery supervisor and the corporate executive. They go through and make sure you’ve got a good grasp of that.”

Been there, done that

“I started out as a 16-year-old, a part-timer, bagging groceries and cleaning bathrooms, doing whatever I was asked to do,” Daschel said. “I’ve always held that in management as you get a promotion, you still have all the responsibilities you had before; you just add responsibilities.

“I’m a store director now; but I still sack groceries and I still clean bathrooms. I was here at 4 in the morning the other day, because I wanted to see how we do snow removal. So I was shoveling the sidewalks.

“You never lose a responsibility and there’s no such thing as a job that isn’t important. Whatever the operation needs, I’m willing and able to do the job. I’m not bigger than any job. I’ve done them all.”

Contact John Kubal at jkubal@brookingregister.com.