As the hardreading staff noted earlier, yesterday’s Boston Herald got the better of the Globe in the Boston dailies’ coverage of the Demoulas Slapfight/Market Basket Rumpus. But today, the stately local broadsheet was on the story like Brown on Williamson, with four – count ’em, four – pieces on the grocery-store equivalent of mutually assured destruction.
Start, of course, with Page One (the Globe ePaper is Lost in Cyberspace right now, so no screenshots for you!).
Market Basket board still ponders sale offers
Bid by ousted leader reportedly the focus
Negotiations over the fate of the embattled Market Basket grocery chain stretched into a second day Tuesday, as the company’s board said the owners were evaluating a sale to help rescue the multibillion-dollar business.
As analysts warn that the value of the company falls and the threat to workers’ jobs rises with each day of indecision, the board said it was still considering offers by ousted president Arthur T. Demoulas and other suitors. People familiar with the talks said Demoulas’s offer was the focus of discussions throughout the day.
And Market Basket is the focus of the Globe throughout today’s paper. Drifting back to the Business section we find Shirley Leung’s column about other grocery families that struggled with ownership, Jack Newsham’s piece on Market Basket loyalists shopping at the competition, and a look at social media by Callum Borchers and Andrew Ba Tran, complete with nifty graphic.
Social media play key role in Market Basket saga
It should be no surprise that in the digital age Facebook has served as the center of the Market Basket protest movement. But just a few short weeks ago, many of the employees leading the fight barely knew their way around the Internet.
Until recently Market Basket didn’t have an official company website. It quickly crashed and is still not working. Managers have company e-mail accounts but use them sparingly. When you work in a supermarket, the colleague you need to talk to is never more than a few aisles away.
“Technology is not part of our company culture,” acknowledged Tom Gordon, who was a a grocery supervisor at market basket for 39 years before being fired in early July for helping organize the protest. “I’m still using my flip phone, if that’s any indication.
Yet a Facebook page called Save Market Basket has become the hub where workers lay out the next course of action to get their ousted president, Arthur. T. Demoulas reinstated, post news articles and letters from the company’s board of directors, and where tens of thousands of customers have pledged their support.
feels like there’s no bottom to this well, doesn’t it?
It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town 