He Quit the Piggly Wiggly and Opened a Store Next Door

George Washington Jenkins Jr. came into Tampa in the summer of 1925 with nine dollars in his pocket and a change of clothes, dropped off in the middle of a city he did not know. He was seventeen years old. He had come to make his fortune in Florida real estate and then go back to Georgia Tech, and he did neither.

George Washington Jenkins Jr., founder of Publix Super Markets, Lakeland Florida

His people were grocers. His father ran a general store up in Harris City, Georgia, catering to the farming families of the piedmont, and the boy grew up behind that counter. His sister Libby said later that he liked to get up and go, that there was not a lazy bone in his body, and that she never saw anybody enjoy work the way George did. He was barely tall enough to see over the counter, she remembered, but he waited on his father's customers, and the customers called him Mr. Little George. When the boll weevil came through in the twenties and took the cotton, the Jenkins family moved on.

In Florida he pushed a broom for a Piggly Wiggly in St. Petersburg. Then he stocked shelves. Within months he was managing the store. Its weekly sales were thirteen hundred dollars when he took it, and eight months later they were six thousand. The chain moved him to its largest location, in Winter Haven, and he stayed there four years.

In 1930, with the Depression settling over the country, he quit. He took his savings of thirteen hundred dollars, sold stock to a handful of men, and opened a store next door to the Piggly Wiggly he had just left.

The Piggly Wiggly brought in a manager from Miami, and the two stores competed across a shared wall. Piggly Wiggly would offer a premium; Publix would offer something better. It went on that way until the Piggly Wiggly closed.

In 1940 Jenkins put up the orange grove he had bought during the worst of the Depression as collateral for a seventy-thousand-dollar loan. He closed his two existing stores. He put everything he had into one building in Winter Haven — what his bankers called his marble, glass and stucco food palace. It had air conditioning in a Florida that mostly did not. It had fluorescent lighting and wide aisles and music playing overhead and dairy cases designed to his specifications, because nothing adequate yet existed. At the entrance there was a door that opened by itself — an electric eye, the kind he had seen once at Penn Station in New York.

Publix Super Market grand opening circa 1940s Florida, crowd gathered outside George Jenkins' original food palace storefront

He did not invent the supermarket, and he said so himself. He said the grocery business was not a science. "It's an art," he told the Tampa Tribune in 1988, and by then he had spent sixty years in it.

By 1945 he had moved his headquarters to Lakeland and purchased a failing chain of nineteen stores, and he set about rebuilding them one by one.

Publix Super Markets headquarters building in Lakeland, Florida — the company George Jenkins moved to Polk County in 1945

He called his employees associates. On the heels of the Depression he gave each of them a two-dollar-a-week raise, held the money, and in fifty weeks it was paid in full and everyone in the store was a stockholder. Mark Hollis, who would rise to vice chairman of the company, said the reasoning was that a person who owns part of a company will care more for it. They called Jenkins Mr. George.

He kept on his desk, facing whoever had come to see him, a small plaque that read: Begin. The Rest Is Easy. He traveled on what he called idea-seeking trips, reading and looking for what could be better. In 1965 he described how he handled his store managers: he gave them a free hand as much as possible, and even when he was convinced an idea would not work, he thought it better to let a man spend a few hundred dollars to see for himself, because he developed his resources that way and his next idea probably would work.

Publix founder George Jenkins at his desk, Lakeland Florida — the plaque on his desk read "Begin. The Rest Is Easy."

He suffered a stroke in 1989 and kept working. He traveled the stores in a wheelchair, talking to customers and associates, bagging groceries. He died in Lakeland in the spring of 1996, at the city's regional medical center, and was buried in Oak Hill Burial Park. He was eighty-eight years old. Dan Davis, chairman of Winn-Dixie, who had competed against him in Florida, said on Jenkins's death that his passing probably marked the end of an era in the business, and counted Jenkins among a group of men who gambled and survived in relatively rough times. Four days before he died, he had been in a store.

Oak Hill Burial Park entrance, Lakeland Florida — where Publix founder George Jenkins was buried in 1996

Correction, September 15, 2026: An earlier version of this story ended with a closing section written in the first person, which does not belong in an unbylined story. It has been removed, and the headline on the page now matches the story's title.