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The Idea That Started It All
Sidney Ball returned from World War I and was newly married. He was a focused, no-nonsense man, acutely aware of his responsibilities. So Sidney Ball went about looking for a way to meet those responsibilities. He considered several options to pursue. It was his new bride who came up with the idea to open a grocery store. Her father and her brothers owned a grocery store, and Mollie Ball was certain there was room for one in the rapidly growing Kansas City area.

Sidney and Mollie Ball scraped together the money in 1923 to buy a small building and opened the first Ball's grocery store. Back then, customers paid their grocery bill once a month. Mollie kept a running tab of the daily orders, and the customers paid on a monthly credit system.

In 1934, Sidney had a new idea. Having survived the worst of the Depression, he and Mollie opened a new store at 21st Street and Quindaro Boulevard. The store implemented a cash-and-carry system, offering lower prices in return for immediate cash payments. The system was new to Kansas City, and everyone told Sidney and Mollie Ball that it would never work. Everyone, that is, except the customers who came in droves to the store, leaving their cash behind and taking their groceries with them.

The cash and carry system would be the first of many innovations that set Sidney and Mollie Ball's growing business apart from much of the grocery industry.

When World War II broke out, and mothers and wives were working at the Defense Plant and struggling to find time to make dinner for their families, Mollie was looking for a way to help out and decided to make take-home dinners. The take-home meatloaf and other dishes became famous throughout the neighborhood.

During the war, small businesses began to expand and grow. The Ball's company expanded, too, opening their third store in 1948 and unveiling yet another new innovation. The store at 34th and State Avenue was Kansas City's first large-scale supermarket. Once again, the skeptics said it was doomed to fail -- no credit, no delivery, too far out of town.

The supermarket, however, was so successful that Ball's opened another store in 1956, the one at 55th and Leavenworth Road which is still going strong today.

That same year, Fred Ball, the son of Sidney and Mollie, graduated from college with a business degree and joined the business full-time. In the mid-1960s, he became president of Ball's Food Stores.

By the mid-70s, Sidney and Mollie Ball, both in their 70's, turned over control of the company to their only son. That was the good news. The bad news was that he was greeted with rampant inflation. Buying power was dropping as food prices were rising. Fred Ball's solution was to try a new concept -- a bare bones, warehouse market with the lowest possible prices.

It was an idea whose time had come, and the results were positive and immediate.

Fred Ball had helped grow Ball's Food Stores into the largest retail grocer in the Kansas City area, a company known and admired throughout the industry.

Changes in society and advances in technology have dramatically altered today's grocery shopping patterns. Hen House Markets reflect such changes by responding to customers' desires and offering innovative options.

Fred Ball's son, David, has moved through the company ranks and is now positioned to lead the company into the 21st Century. David Ball believes one constant will outweigh any trend: "the importance of listening to customers and accommodating their needs." "If one-stop shopping is important, that's what we need to do," he says. "If a children's playhouse is important to have in the store, that's what we need to have. What's important to the customer is what's important to us."

Certainly, technology will play an important role in the future of retailing. In the near future, consumers will be able to place orders on-line and supermarkets will prepare orders for pick-up or even deliver groceries directly to the consumer's home. Most importantly, David Ball expects continued demand for products and services that save time for shoppers, particularly prepared foods such as the restaurant-quality meals found in Hen House Markets' "Ready Case."

Says David Ball, "We have to offer friendliness and well-trained teammates educated with product knowledge. Our stores have to be the best place to shop."