Save Mart may be changing hands, but its relationship with Modesto must live on

Must all good things come to an end?

Homegrown and locally owned Save Mart Supermarkets have been good for Modesto and Stanislaus County for 70 years. Now the chain’s new owner, Kingswood Capital Management LP, has the challenge of maintaining the positive relationship between Save Mart and the community that nurtured it all these years.

It’s one thing when the produce worker or the employee at the deli counter greets you by name, which happens for many loyal customers at any of 10 Save Marts and three Food Maxx stores throughout the county. It’s quite another when a grocery chain invests extraordinarily in community good will, as Save Mart did particularly under the late Bob Piccinini, who died in 2015.

His father and uncle founded the company, and Piccinini was behind its impressive expansion to more than 200 stores in North and Central California after buying out extended family members in 1985.

But Piccinini didn’t stop with stores. He owned several minor-league baseball teams, including the Modesto A’s, and was credited with saving in 1998 the vaunted Modesto Relays — a world-class track meet fondly remembered by many in town — for another decade at Modesto Junior College. Asked once whether he did that for business or civic duty, he answered, “Both.”

Beyond Modesto, Fresno has enjoyed athletics at its university’s Save Mart Center since 2003. Piccinini also was a minority owner of the Golden State Warriors and headed an investment group that nearly purchased the Oakland Athletics in 1999.

And now, Save Mart is California’s largest family-owned grocery store chain.

Save Mart — a Modesto icon

If you’ve shopped at a Save Mart, FoodMaxx or Lucky, or enjoyed a Modesto Nuts game or watched the Warriors win national basketball championships, you’ve benefited from the groundwork laid by our hometown icon.

That’s a lot of lives touched by one company — a good corporate neighbor, and a point of pride for Modesto.

So it’s a little scary to see someone else — a Los Angeles private equity firm, in this case — take control.

Can customers expect the same treatment from a conglomerate that they got from a neighborhood shop? Will corporate America take care of its employees the way that one of our families did? If profits wane, can a behemoth focused on the bottom line resist closing stores, causing disruption to workers and shoppers alike?

A word of advice for Kingswood, the parent company of Cost Plus, Bed Bath & Beyond, and now Save Mart: Keep it going.

Never forget Save Mart’s roots. Invest in Modesto. Find ways of living up to your promise of making “good businesses even better.”

This story was originally published March 29, 2022 at 4:00 AM.