Collecting The Carts

The best place to start this story is with Al Kessel. He was an icon of local television commercials in Michigan.

His strategy for his commercials was basic but effective. He’d show up in the commercials, sharing his latest deals, holding the products to show them off. The ads would always show up on Wednesdays, and you would always wonder what he’d do next. Not quite Crazy Eddie, not quite Dave Thomas. He was his own thing.

While no modern examples of this exist online as far as I can tell, he was famed for throwing particularly large objects, like turkeys or watermelons, sometimes leading to an audible off-camera smash. The commercials were quirky and low budget, but it worked.

Kessel was an icon throughout the region for these commercials, though not a universally beloved one. See, after Kroger closed a number of stores in union battles in the early ’80s, Kessel (an executive at another grocery chain) bought the stores and reopened them as Kessel Food Stores, sans union. It led to protests, but people don’t remember those. They instead remember the cheerful guy who threw turkeys on TV. Brilliant strategy, if you think about it.

When I found myself working at one of his stores, I wondered if I someday might see him. The answer was yes—after he had sold the chain to Kroger in 2000, closing the store I worked at, literally on the final day the store was open. It was the first time I remembered being starstruck, and I was starstruck by the guy who was literally kind of ruining my cozy little work life.

I’m older now, and I now understand the dynamics of this story at a higher level. Intentionally or not, Kessel essentially laundered Kroger out of unionization over a two-decade period, where he ran the stores, then eventually sold most of the stores back. Cunning strategy on Kroger’s part when you lay it all out. I loved working at that store, but when it closed, I got transferred. The next one, I ended up quitting within a couple of months, because of a debate over bottle deposits.

(A quick aside on that last point: Essentially, local bars would deposit all of their bottles at our grocery store, even if they didn’t actually buy anything at the store. I requested that reasonable limits be put on the bottles, rather than sticking me at a machine for two hours of a four-hour shift when someone dropped off $100 worth of glass bottles. My request, which presumably would have gone over better with a union, was refused. So I quit.)

It was a nice two-year lesson in the upsides and downsides of corporate culture, and I learned it when I wasn‘t even making $6 an hour.

As far as I’m concerned, Al Kessel wasn’t as cool as Chris Zolinski

So, yeah, Al Kessel wasn’t my favorite person in that moment. He sold the company and caused unnecessary chaos in the lives of all his non-unionized employees, who had to go across town for their job when they previously might have been able to walk to work.

As a journalist, I have met my share of CEOs, and in YouTube tier terms, he’s not getting above a C grade. I worked in that store a year and a half and that store-closing visit was literally the only time he was there that I know of. The chain was not that big.

In commercial terms, if you worked for him, you were the turkey being thrown. You joined a company that existed to bust a union and like me, you probably weren’t even aware of it because you were 17. But that’s OK, because I secretly know who the real CEO of the Kessel Food Stores was. It was my friend Chris Zolinski.

We had been friends for a few years—he lived near me and we went to the same high school. We were fellow computer nerds—I talked the high school into letting me build the website, he talked the school district into letting him work on IT stuff. He got me the job at the grocery store. And one of the memories that really sticks with me about him is that he basically had the run of the place. He knew everybody, from the cashiers, to the shelf-stockers, to the customer service folks. He had all the answers, and if he didn’t have the answer, he knew the person who did.

In a just world, Chris Zolinski would have been a better Al Kessel, throwing turkeys off the conveyor belt or pointing out the deals in the deli department. He would have been the locally famous one. And he would have done so with the level of wacky pizzazz and goofiness that he specialized in. His jokes and his demeanor would have made those commercials truly something to watch, rather than mere oddities of local television.

But OK, that wasn’t in the cards for him. Not everyone can be a local supermarket magnate. Chris eventually found a life in IT; like me, he was passionate about the idea of reusing tech components, and he would often find new homes for old computers. And he was always ready to support someone who needed help. When he got married, he became the ultimate family man. And the thing that carried him through was this unique sort of swagger, this ability to understand the room around him and the people who filled that room.

I’ve never personally been that guy, other than a few moments here and there. I had to earn whatever modest public speaking skills I do have. I get nervous. I remember once, when I was in college, I had a terrible case of anxiety about doing a class presentation in front of a classroom of 30 people and barely making it through. Chris, meanwhile, taught classes at community college. I eventually found my way past all those anxious feelings. To Chris, it came easy.

Congratulations reader, you figured it out, this is not actually about grocery stores

Chris was an endlessly helpful friend. The example I go back to is when I was living in the dorms in college. I had a job where I served as “night receptionist”—i.e. ID checker for students walking into the dorm at 3 a.m. I was sitting there for hours, and many times, nobody showed up. Perfect time to use a computer and get some design work done. Problem was I owned a desktop with no Wi-Fi. But I did know where an Ethernet port was—buried deep in the office.

I supplied (OK, borrowed) the TV cart. Chris supplied the 200-foot cable. And the portfolio site I made in the middle of the night got me my first job.

The two of us have not worked in a grocery store in decades. Our paths diverged. I was the guy who built the website and filled it with words; he was the guy who ensured that your IT infrastructure did what it was supposed to do. He took part in local politics; he supported his church and local nonprofits. He was a wonderful family man. He stayed relatively close to home. I moved away.

Earlier this year, when I tried to respark the conversation with him because it had honestly been a while, my angle in was to talk about computers—then and now, it was the key thing we had in common. (Surprisingly, he was not a command line fan, though, though maybe it’s because he was Windows-centric. It’s OK—he had way more certifications than I’ll ever have.)

But I am not going to lie. I struggled, because time and distance and my frustrating tendency to not pick up my damn phone meant that we weren’t starting from that place of easy conversation. Back when he was secretly besting Al Kessel at his own job, it was easy. But it was too important not to rekindle.

Chris had a rough go of it these past couple of years, dealing with a nagging health crisis that just would not go away. The weight that sarcoma and its associated health crises put on both him and his family can’t be understated, and it ultimately was a weight that would win out.

(My Bluesky followers may be aware that he was attempting to bring his daughter to an Alex Warren concert while he still had the chance, but was leaning on viral attention to make it happen. I’m happy to say that he got that moment.)

Last week, Chris Zolinski, the guy whose energy filled the room, the guy whose voicemail demeanor was one-of-a-kind, the guy who both knew the score and wasn’t afraid to share it, passed away at the age of 43. (He leaves behind a wife and two daughters, and while I understand that it’s a tough world out there, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention they could use financial support right now. Honestly, laid out, it’s why I’m writing this.)

It’s not the first loss of someone important to me. It’s not even the first loss of someone important to me who was 43 years old. But I think it’s important that I make clear to all of you that my offbeat sense of humor probably would not exist without this guy.

When I was looking around for just the right photos to share of him, I thought that maybe it would be next to a computer, or doing something wacky, something to capture the energy of the voicemails he left me. (Unlike me, he was into wrestling; maybe one of those?)

But as I dug around looking at photos, I made the realization that his superpower was people. The people in his life—the people that he could help. The people in his family who loved him. The folks for whom he volunteered his time at his church, at the local school district, or elsewhere. The students he taught. He is not the kind of person for whom a solo photo does him justice. He needs other people in the frame to bounce off of. (Thank you to his wife Steph for allowing me to share.)

In a just, perfect world, we would have fewer leaders like Al Kessel, who throws the turkey by accident, and more like Chris Zolinski, who would have thrown the turkey with intention, with whimsy. Rather than making it amusing, he would have made it funny. And in a just world, he would have made it longer than 43 years.

Godspeed, my friend. I’ll keep rounding up the carts.