He is probably the favorite boss of the French and an essential media face. But before becoming a powerful businessman, Michel-Edouard Leclerc started at the bottom of the scale. Everything, at the bottom …
At 73, Michel-Edouard Leclerc always aims to offer his customers just prices to do their shopping. If he is not a saint who pays only in good conscience, he knows however the importance of respecting the increasingly tight budget of the French. It must be said that his first job put him in front of a harsh reality.
“The first time I worked …”
Before being the big boss we know, Michel -Edouard Leclerc – whose amount of fortune we do not know but which would pay between 200,000 and 250,000 euros per year according to The Parisian – First was …. garbage collector! It is the very first work he has done for Leclerc centers, of which he is today the boss. In July 2014, Michel-Edouard Leclerc told this surprising anecdote to RTL.
He had said that his father believed that to fully understand the economy of the family business, he had to know all the cogs. Starting with the garbage cans therefore. This is how he was responsible for sorting the waste from the family brand of Landerneau, his hometown. “The first time I worked was in my parents’ store. If I wanted to spend my vacation as I wanted, I had to do my internship month first. And I was paid”first reported the businessman.
“It remains, like guilt”
“My father had this theory is that we had to start with the trash cans. In the trash cans, we see everything. We see the mess, we see the flight, we see the breakage and we also see the rotation of the stocks. We sorted: what was still recoverable, we gave it to charitable associations (…) “explained Michel-Edouard Leclerc.
And to this father of four, remarried to the Russian Natalia Olzoeva, to continue: “When we sort the garbage cans, you learn to have selflessness. The employee who was with me (…) shown me that there were poverty in my city of Landerneau. There were homeless people and these people were waiting for us to come and rush on the trash cans and do their own sorting in turn.”
An experience that marked him with a hot iron. “It remains, like guilt. As long as this poverty exists, we have rights, but we have duties”concluded that which is today one of the bosses of large distribution in France.
