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News & Updates

Check back for regular updates on Art Pope’s presence in the news.

Mar
25
2015

Variety Wholesalers honors long-term employees

Categories: In the Headlines, Roses
Variety Wholesalers, a Henderson, NC- based company which owns and operates a chain of retail stores including Roses, has honored two long-term employees who have spent nearly six decades with the store.  Article by The Daily Dispatch (Henderson, NC) Written by: By Sarah Mansur March 21, 2015 Ruth Bartholomew and Pete Pegram each have spent nearly six decades as employees of Variety Wholesalers in Henderson. They are two of 12 employees honored recently by the Henderson-based company, which owns Roses Inc. Communications Director Mel Hanks said the total service of all 12 comes to 382 years. “That is just an astounding number,” said Wilson Sawyer, chief operating officer of Variety Wholesalers, in a press release. “We are proud of all our associates, but we are especially happy that the ones we’re honoring have been so loyal and productive for so very long.” The other employees celebrated for varying lengths of service between five and 40 years are Dot Inscoe, Rickey Owen, Debbie Taylor, Kay Ayscue, Candy Stevens, Mary Beth Boynton, Dave Stinson, Mike Burgess, Alex Ellington, and Kelly Currin. Pegram and Bartholomew are the longest serving employees at Variety Wholesalers. Bartholomew, 78, has been with the company in several different roles for 58 years. She began in 1957 as a data entry employee when she was 20 years old. Her title now is senior merchandise distribution specialist. “Every boss I’ve had has been a good boss,” Bartholomew said. “I’ve not had a problem with anyone since I been here.” Her daughter worked in the Roses Inc.’s offices before she had children. And Bartholomew’s husband worked there for more than 30 years before retiring. As of now, she has no plans to retire. “We work but we have fun,” she said. Pegram, 79, trails not far behind Bartholomew with 56 years at the company. When he began working for Variety Wholesalers, the company sent him to New York City for four weeks for training. It was his first plane ride and his first trip to the Big Apple. His current job is working as a computer programmer in the accounting department. Pegram said technology has changed drastically since he started his career. “We went from punch cards to saving things on magnetic tape and disk storage,” he said. “Now, it’s all online. It’s all on the screen in front of you.” He said he feels fortunate to have worked this long in the same company. “I am fortunate to have been able to grow and learn here,” he said. Source: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6nxRTEfIcOMJ:www.hendersondispatch.com/news/x268551264/Variety-Wholesalers-honors-long-term-employees+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
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Mar
11
2015

Save-A-Lot store opening in April to replenish ‘food desert’ in south Raleigh

Categories: In the Headlines, Roses
Triangle Business Journal Reports new Variety Wholesale owned store opening March 10, 2015: Triangle Business Journal: Real Estate Inc. By Amanda Jones Hoyle The owner of the Roses discount store chain has set an April 1 opening date for its first Save-A-Lot grocery store location in a section of Raleigh declared as a “food desert” by a federal report due to its lack of grocery options for neighboring residents. The Save-A-Lot store will share a building with a Roses discount store that opened in January. Former state budget director Art Pope, who is also chairman and CEO of Henderson-based Variety Wholesalers, stated in a news release that his family-owned company is “committed to building stores in areas that need access to fresh, nutritious food at great prices.” Variety Wholesalers is the parent company of Roses, and it is partnering with Save-A-Lot as a franchise owner of the national discount grocery brand to open the Raleigh location. Pope says both stores will also be staffed mostly by residents from the surrounding southeast Raleigh neighborhoods. The Roses employs 76 people, and the Save-A-Lot will employ about 25 people. Kroger closed its grocery location in the 60,000-square-foot building at 1610 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard two years ago.Variety Wholesalers bought the building for $2.7 million in July. The area around the building had been classified as a “food desert,” according to USDA guidelines, because of the number of low-income population around it who live more than one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store. Read the article at Triangle Business Journal here: http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/real-estate/2015/03/save-a-lot-roses-variety-wholesalers-raleigh.html
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Jan
22
2015

Pope Offers Thoughts on UNC System on TWC’s Capital Tonight

Categories: In the Headlines, Videos
  January 22 — On Time Warner Cable News this week, Art Pope sat down with Capital Tonight host Tim Boyum to discuss the future of the university system in North Carolina. The episode which aired on January 20, is online in its entirety.  Move to the seven minute mark to catch the segment with Art Pope: http://www.twcnews.com/nc/triangle-sandhills/politics/2015/01/21/capital-tonight-jan–20–former-state-budget-director-art-pope.html Art Pope on Capital Tonight   Capital Tonight is a program of Time Warner cable news, airing across the state of North Carolina and featuring a mix of analysis, interviews and news.
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Dec
23
2014

Pope Exposed: News & Observer Columnist Covers ‘The Giving Side of Art Pope’

On December 23, 2014,  News & Observer columnist Barry Saunders wrote about Art Pope, the philanthropist, and his work with the Pope Foundation.  The column appears below and can be read online at: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/12/22/4423459/saunders-the-giving-side-of-art.html?sp=/99/102/110/117/197/. Saunders: The giving side of Art Pope BY BARRY SAUNDERS Ah, man. It would be the social event of the season – nay, of the millennium – but alas, it’ll never happen, cap’n. They wouldn’t even have to pay me to cover a wang dang doodle attended by people from all of the groups that get money from the J.W. Pope Foundation: just being there and seeing those in tuxes and tatters mingling would be payment a’plenty. Since 1986, the beau monde and thedemimonde – that’s the high-class swells who dine at white-linen establishments and the struggling soup-kitchen mavens who do what they have to to survive – have benefited from the altruistic contributions of the organization headed by Art Pope. Yes, that Art Pope. Pope, the current chairman and president of the Pope Foundation and Variety Wholesalers Inc., is the most polarizing person in state politics – and he’s not even in politics. Depending upon on which side of the aisle one stands, Pope is a selfless patriot or a reactionary zealot who at best is indifferent to the poor. While serving as Gov. Pat McCrory’s budget director, Pope was thought by many to be the state’s real chief executive, earning the sobriquet “Pope Art” and “knight of the right.” I always doubted that Pope was controlling state government, because much of it has been so dysfunctional that it would be hard to find Pope’s imprint on it. It’s not hard to find it on Step Up Ministry, though. Steve Swayne, CEO of the nonprofit jobs and life skills training program, said the $25,000 his organization received from the Pope Foundation “will help us place 30 people in jobs. … Many of these people have been in the criminal justice system, over half of them have been homeless.” It has placed 554 in jobs this year. Whenever I’ve sought comments from Pope in the past, it was about some political move that had infuriated half of the populace and delighted others. That’s why when I called and left a message last week, I hurried up and let his office know that I come in peace, in recognition of the Christmas season. Philanthropic father When I reached him by phone, he explained that his father, John W. Pope, had long been philanthropic. “My parents gave directly … and the company gave to local charities in the areas where we had employees. … When I joined the family business in 1986, he wanted to channel the family and company charitable giving through a foundation. One of the first tasks he assigned to me was to form this Pope Foundation.” Pope said the group’s local humanitarian giving is centered in Wake, Vance and Harnett counties. “That’s where our family is from, where the company is from, where most of our employees are. Mainly, it’s a geographic criteria. … We have a board of directors – originally, it was just me sitting down with my father reviewing the grant requests. In the last six or seven years, we’ve gotten more professional, a staff with grant officers – not many: we only have two people on the payroll. I’m not on the payroll, by the way. “They review and recommend the grantees, and we present it to the board of directors and the board approves it,” he said. Just reading the list of the groups that received almost $2 million in December is enough to set the mind a-racing at the thought of seeing them all coming together. In addition to Step Up Ministry, groups as disparate as the N.C. Symphony, N.C. Museum of Art, Helping Horse Therapeutic Riding Program, Carolina Ballet, Shepherd’s Table Soup Kitchen, Safe Haven for Cats, and the Food Banks of Central and Eastern North Carolina all received grants from the foundation. Pope, in a news release, said, “The old ‘give a man a fish’ parable is that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but that if you teach a man how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. We believe in doing both.” That’s cool, but too many people don’t consider that, for a man to fish, he at least needs a pole. And a lake.      
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Dec
23
2014

Art Pope Responds to False Indy Week Piece

In a December 17, 2014, Indy Week news article, author Sam DeGrave published several false facts, generating inaccurate assumptions about Art Pope and the John William Pope Foundation’s involvement with the University of North Carolina Board of Governors in North Carolina.  To read the original Indy Week article, “Is the long reach of Art Pope driving the UNC Board of Governors’ Review,” visit their website. On December 23, 2014, the Indy Week published Pope’s letter to the editor that corrected the false facts.  The letter in its entirety can be read below and on their website. Pope responds  If the INDY is going to pass off a college student’s opinion piece as a news feature, (“Politics of Scrutiny” Dec. 17), one would think that getting basic facts correct would still be a requirement. Contrary to Mr. DeGrave’s reporting, I have never been chairman of the Civitas Institute or directed its day-to-day operations—though I have previously served on its board of directors. The article is also wrong when it stated that the Pope Foundation, of which I am the Chairman, has a “long history of animosity toward the UNC System,” and called for a review of UNC centers “as a cost cutting measure.” To the contrary, as a grant-making foundation, the Pope Foundation has given over $5 Million to support UNC, with a grant payment this month for $400,000 to support the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. If the INDY had bothered to ask me about the article’s main point, I would have answered that rather than “driving” the UNC Board of Governors review, I did not even know about the BOG’s interviews of the selected UNC centers until after they happened, and I read about it in a real newspaper. Interestingly, Mr. DeGrave himself reported, “half of these centers could be viewed as counter to the agenda of the Republican-controlled state legislature.” Instead of trusting Mr. DeGrave’s reporting (given his failure to share the facts), I personally would rely on the UNC Board of Governors’ review to determine if these centers have productive academic missions, rather than a partisan agenda in support of or in opposition to either the Democratic or Republican Party’s legislative agendas. But since I was not asked for an interview, even though the INDY prominently featured my name in the headline and story, the real question to ask the Indy is if this story was simply sloppy journalism by a student intern or deliberate propaganda? Art Pope      
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