Live Happily Ever NOW: What a Room of 450 Taught Us This Week

Yesterday afternoon, the event space at Hard Rock Casino Cincinnati filled up about as far as a room can go before it turns into row seating. NextUp Cincinnati's Fall Premier Event, It Starts With You, had just under 500 people registered. Allow for the usual no shows and call it roughly 450 people in the room.

Look around that room and you saw this industry. Brokers. CPG manufacturers. Kroger associates, both current and former. Around 450 of the finest people in the Cincinnati CPG community, all under one roof on a Wednesday afternoon.

The featured speaker was Jess Sims, the Peloton instructor, ESPN College GameDay reporter, and Good Morning America contributor who spent years as a teacher and school principal in Harlem before trading education for fitness. Her session was about building resilience, confidence, and momentum through small, intentional choices.

She started in a way most of us did not expect. Before a single slide, she had the whole room breathe. In, and out. Three or four times, 450 people together, as a reminder that in the middle of the deadlines and the deck revisions, we sometimes forget to breathe. You could feel the room settle.

But the line that stuck with the room was not on a slide. It was on her arm.

Live Happily Ever NOW

Jess has a tattoo that reads "Live Happily Ever NOW." It serves as her daily reminder to practice self-care and find joy in the present moment, rather than postponing happiness until after the next task or milestone is finished.

If you work in this business, you know exactly how easy it is to push happiness down the road. We will breathe after the category review. After the KOMPASS submission. After the reset. After the deduction backlog is cleared. After Q4. The finish line keeps moving, and "happily ever after" keeps getting scheduled for a date that never actually lands on the calendar.

"I Have To" Becomes "I Get To"

Jess paired it with a simple word twist. Swap "I have to" for "I get to." Try it on a normal week in the Kroger world:

• I have to prep for a category review becomes I get to tell my brand's story to the Category Managers who decide the shelf.
• I have to work through these deductions becomes I get to recover money my company already earned.
• I have to make another Kroger call becomes I get to work alongside people who know this business as well as anyone in the country.

Same work. Different posture. And posture shows up in every meeting you walk into.

The room even gave these little mindset shifts a name: Jessiziums. Live Happily Ever NOW is one. "I get to" is another. If you were there, or even if you were not, share your own and tag it #Jessiziums. We would love to see what this community comes up with.

Get to at Least One of These a Year

If you read this publication, here is our ask: get yourself to at least one NextUp event a year. There are several on the Cincinnati calendar, and regional events are open to everyone.

To be fair, these events are Cincinnati focused, not 100% grocery trade focused. But look around the room and the vast majority of attendees are Kroger connected, brokers, CPG manufacturers, and Kroger associates past and present. Where else do you get all three in one room, with no deck to present and no agenda to push? That is a rare thing in this business, and it is worth a few hours of your calendar.

Now Picture That Room More Than Six and a Half Times Over

If you attended, here is one visual to walk away with. Picture that room. Every seat taken, about 450 of your local peers.

Earlier this month, Kroger told employees it plans to eliminate about 3,000 corporate roles over the next three years, roughly 37% of its approximately 8,200 corporate employees, according to reporting on an internal memo from CEO Greg Foran.

Remember the CEO's comments on removing layers. In his memo, Foran wrote that the company has more layers and overhead than it needs, and that simplifying means making faster decisions. On paper, "layers" is org chart language. In that room yesterday, the layers had names.

These are our co-workers and our friends. Many of them have families, kids, mortgages, and real obligations. Some of them were sitting at the next table yesterday. This one sits hard.

Sit With This One for a While

We are not here to argue the strategy. Kroger has said the savings will go toward lower prices, a better shopping experience, and investment in its frontline associates, and the competitive pressure behind that is real. But the next time you are in a room with 450 of your local peers, sit with the math for a moment. Maybe take one of Jess's breaths while you do.

This is where Jess's tattoo stops being a nice line and becomes something practical. Live Happily Ever NOW is not about pretending everything is fine. It is about not postponing what matters. Call the Kroger contact you have not talked to in a while, not to sell anything, just to check in.

A word of care on that call. When you reach your Category Manager, do not lead with "Are you safe?" or "Are you OK?" Use judgment and care. The honest answer is that a lot of people are not OK right now, and it is OK not to be OK. Uncertainty sits hard with all of us. We swallow hard, smile, and say something like, "Oh yeah, I'm fine." What else would they say? So skip the question that puts them on the spot. Talk to them like a person, listen more than you talk, and let them share what they want to share.

If someone you know is affected, offer what you can: an introduction, a reference, a coffee. The relationships this industry runs on do not disappear when a title does, and many of these folks will land at the brokers, manufacturers, and agencies you work with every day.

And for everyone sitting in the uncertainty right now: you do not have to wait for it to resolve to find something good in today. You get to show up for it.

Sources: NextUp event calendar; ESPN Press Room; Supermarket News; Bloomberg via Insurance Journal; FOX Business.

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From Cincinnati CPG Edge, keeping you in the Kroger know.