1946 – 2026 Watching Steinbach Grow: Car break-down leads to Auto City grocer’s career

A beat-up old Whippet rattled along a dirt road in central Saskatchewan, where dried up tracts of prairie stretched out on either side. The old machine shifted into low gear and crawled up a hill, barely making it to the top. It was the summer of 1935, midway through ‘the Dirty 30’s.

Inside the car was Jac A. Penner and Esther, his bride of two days, both clutching the sides of the car for dear life as they began to roll down the other side of the hill. About halfway down, the couple in the car were startled to see their back wheel pass them on the road and go rolling off onto a field.

It looked to young Penner and his bride as though the ultimate calamity had overtaken them. They were on their way from Herbert, Saskatchewan to visit relatives at Waldheim and were not prepared for a catastrophe like this.

As they were sitting there a little dazed by this sudden turn of events, a late model car drove up and offered to take them on their journey the rest of the way. Their benefactor turned out to be a man who was connected with a large chain of grocery stores and learning that Penner was a grocery clerk, he made a note in a little book he was carrying. He dropped the Penners off at their destination, and went on his way.

Some months later, Penner got a telegram from the man while he was working as a general all-around man at $45 per month in the dingy old Herbert grocery store. The man had befriended him and his young bride on the road, and was offering him the job of manager in the OK Economy store at Rosthern.

Penner accepted the offer and went up to Rosthern to become the youngest manager in the whole chain of 40 Economy stores. At first, the whole thing looked like quite a plum, but he soon learned it was nothing of the sort, as he was the fourth manager to try the job within a year-and-a-half.

However, nothing could possibly be much worse than the job he had just left. In Herbert, Penner had worked for six long years in about as a low paying and unprogressive job as it would be possible to imagine. The hours at the store were 7 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. daily and until midnight on Saturdays.

Penner believed if it hadn’t been for all the fine schooling in the “College of Hard Knocks” at Herbert, he would not have stayed long at Rosthern.

After the young manager had been in the store for some time, it became apparent to him and to the district manager, that his most trusted and popular clerk was systematically defrauding the company. The district manager gave him orders to dismiss the clerk, with the plain understanding that if the clerk was not dismissed in short order, Penner himself would be. Summoning up his courage, Jac swung the axe, the clerk departed, and so did about half the store’s best paying customers.

There was a young fellow in town that Jac had been eyeing and believed to be a young man with a future. Jac chose him as his right hand man to replace the popular clerk, and gradually, the store regained all its lost business and added a lot of new customers to the list.

The Penners spent 11 years in Rosthern, where they got off to a good start in raising their three children, Reg, Jim and Donna. Mrs. Penner always worked in the store since Grandma, who lived with them, was a widow and a very capable housekeeper and nurse for the youngsters.

It was in 1946 that Grandma Penner changed things by getting remarried to J.R. Friesen of Steinbach. She urged the Penners to move to Steinbach and buy the P.W. Friesen store, which was for sale at the time. The Penners discovered that by selling everything they owned, including their wedding gifts and the children’s toys, they could raise just enough money for a down payment.

That’s how they came to take over the Steinbach store known as Modern Grocery.

The growth of the store ever since the Penners took charge of its management was a steady climb upward. By 1959, the Penners were rebuilding it to become the largest and newest supermarket in Steinbach.

Modern Grocery already rivaled the Winnipeg supermarkets in price, outsold them most of the time, and after the new renovation was completed, Penner Foods would rival city supermarkets in size, as well.

At the same time, Jac Penner was certainly setting an example for the business community as president of the Steinbach Chamber of Commerce.

Penner Food’s customers were provided with a large new parking lot to leave their cars while they shopped. They could park off the street, where they didn’t have to worry about a fender-bender while backing out into traffic after shopping.

In those early years, Reg Penner was Jac’s right hand man and James helped out when he was home, as did their daughter Donna.

The Penners only had two clerks when they started the Steinbach store and in 15 years the staff had increased to 11.

During a 1959 town promotion marking the completion of Highway 12 North to connect Steinbach to northern communities like Beausejour, the Chamber of Commerce president spoke of how happy the family was to be here.

“Nothing gives me more pleasure than to go back to our old ledger that we had the first year we were here and look up the names of the families who were our best customers then, and then see that the next generation, in many cases, is still doing business with us.”