by Max Marbut
Staff Writer
If it has been more than six months since you shopped at the Downtown Winn-Dixie grocery store — and especially if when you left, you declared that it would be a very, very cold day in you-know-where before you ever set foot in that store again — you might want to give it another chance.
Many things have changed at the store recently, partly due to Winn-Dixie’s plans to upgrade stores and service company-wide.
The floors are clean, practically spotless. The shelves are well-stocked. Customer service is back and the vagrants are gone. Carts are available — and they work.
But, most of the changes are due to Juan Mott, who took over as store director five months ago.
A former mixed-martial-arts competitor, Mott toured Japan with the Ultimate Fighting Championships. When he retired from the ring three-and-a-half years ago, he went to work as a stocker at a Winn-Dixie store in Atlanta. He discovered he liked the grocery business and was eventually promoted to management, then was selected to attend “Winn-Dixie University.”
After graduation, he and his family moved to Jacksonville and Mott got his first store at the corner of Soutel Drive and Moncrief Road, which he ran for nine months.
When the Downtown store director job opened, he asked for the position because, he said, “I love a challenge. It needed some uplifting. It needed a strong person and hopefully I’m that person.”
Mott said when he arrived, people didn’t want to shop at the store because it wasn’t clean. It is today. Customers also didn’t want to be accosted as soon as they got out of their cars. Those days are gone, too.
“We don’t have those problems any more,” said Mott. “We had vagrants pan-handling in the parking lot. We would just go out there and run them off. Being consistent in that got the word out.”
Another reason people didn’t shop at the store was they had to go practically to Hemming Plaza to find a shopping cart, since so many carts were being stolen. The store now has carts with electronic brakes that lock the wheels if someone tries to remove it from the parking lot.
“We’ve had the carts for two months and we still have all of them. That’s not a problem any more,” said Mott.
More changes at the store will begin in January when a major renovation project begins. The Downtown store will be the first of 50 store rebuilds currently planned by Winn-Dixie. Mott believes the best is yet to come.
“When I saw this opportunity open up at a challenged store, I took it. We’re steadily working on it and it’s turning around,” he said. “We want people who gave up on Winn-Dixie because of the way the store was being run to try us again so we can show them we’re definitely getting better. Downtown is a neighborhood and we’re going to be the neighborhood grocery store.”