State-Journal.com - Frankfort Faces: John Leach

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Photo By State Journal/Hilly SchifferLouis Dawers of Frankfort laughs with John Leach as he is handed a receipt for groceries at Kroger West. Leach said one of his favorite parts of working at Kroger is getting to meet people and seeing them leave with a smile.

John Leach

Photo By State Journal/Hilly SchifferJohn Leach reads prices while checking out a customer at Kroger West. Leach has been a Kroger employee since 1996.

John Leach likes being the calmness in the center of a storm.

As a Kroger checkout clerk for almost 13 years at Franklin West Shopping Center, John has had an opportunity to hand out small doses of politeness and kindness to thousands of shoppers.

Some are too rushed to notice. And that's OK.

There's no extra charge for John's niceness. It comes natural " straight from the heart " not from reading the employee-training handbook.

"Generally I try to treat people the way I would want to be treated," he says. "It's not a big thing. I don't go out of my way to do it.

"I like my job and I think it's important to try to please our customers. I like greeting the public and trying to put smiles on their faces. It's not always an easy task but I hope I succeed at it most of the time."

John, 36, has learned through the years, however, that pleasing all customers is an impossible task.

A woman from Shelbyville comes to mind.

"She always comes in looking for a particular brand of cigarettes and we never have them. She always comes to my lane and she always complains, rudely. I always tell her nicely to call us to find out if we have them and if we do, we will save them for her.

"But she never does that. She comes in and gets louder and louder and louder, and I just remain calm. Maybe it's a test for me. For all I know she could be a secret shopper. Sometimes the nicer you are the more some people get aggravated."

Hilary Beebe, Kroger customer service manager, says John is "a dependable worker. He's very friendly, outgoing and outspoken. He's good with customers and seems to know a lot of them by name. We all like him."

Ron Wade, co-manager of the supermarket, agrees.

"John is very conscientious," Wade says. "He tries to do everything right."
Knowing the Spanish language well, "John helps us out" at times as a translator for some Hispanic customers, Wade says.

John's mother, Mireille Leach, is a native of Guatemala. And that's the main reason John speaks Spanish "almost fluently," he says.

"When I was growing up and on summer breaks from school, I would go to Guatemala. I've probably been there 12 times. That's how I kind of kept up my educational level in Spanish.

"It's much harder to learn from a book than if you are actually around people speaking Spanish every day."

John's father, Dr. Rice Leach, a Lexington physician, is retired from the U.S. Public Health Service. He also worked previously as commissioner of health for the Kentucky Human Resources Cabinet.

John's maternal grandfather was also a medical doctor.

"And my mother has a brother who is a surgeon in California and another brother who is a dentist."

John was born in Arizona on Nov. 18, 1972, on the Tohono O'odham or Papago Indian Reservation.

"I was the only pink baby there," John says, smiling.

Before moving with his parents to Frankfort in 1994, John's family lived in Tucson and Phoenix, South Dakota, New Orleans, Oklahoma and Maryland.

At age 16 in Phoenix, John's first grocery store job was "picking up all the cardboard from the produce and meat departments. When we moved to Maryland, I got a job as a bagger for a Giant grocery store."

He started at Kroger in Frankfort in September 1996, working as a bagger and stocking shelves before becoming a checkout clerk.

He went one semester to Kentucky State University and left Kroger briefly to work at Applebee's and Shoney's restaurants. But he missed working at Kroger.

"I wanted to go back to Kroger because I always felt comfortable there," John says. "Everybody there treats you as a family. We all work as a team."

John has had a history of seizures since he was 2 years old.

"When I was younger I outgrew them," John says. "Now that I'm older, they're coming back little by little. I had two last summer.

"People I work with made sure I was OK until the ambulance arrived. That's why I say we work as a family here. Everybody looks out for one another."

Frankfort Emergency Medical Service workers know John now, too.

"Two EMS people came through my checking lane recently wanting to know if I was feeling all right," he says. "I feel good most of the time."

He thinks his seizures are caused by heat and humidity, he says.

Last October, John had a little medical device implanted in his upper chest, "and since then I've felt a lot better. This magnet I'm wearing, if I go into a seizure or feel one coming on, I rub this little VNS (vagal nerve stimulation) generator and it will pull me out of it."

Once years ago while working the nightshift John scared a customer.

The Shell station near Kroger on U.S. 127 south was robbed, "and I didn't know anything about it. I didn't hear the helicopters outside."

A Kroger manager had asked John to clean the checkout lanes that night, "so I was lying down on the floor cleaning the trim on the bottom of the check lanes," John recalls.

"A lady who worked at Shoney's came in and saw me lying on the floor and thought something bad had happened to me. She screamed and I looked up and asked her what was wrong. Aware of the robbery next door, she thought I had been shot."

Another nighttime customer, who came in regularly to buy cigars, appreciated John's friendliness. That customer, Mark Chidester, is now John's father-in-law and also a Kroger employee.

"He opened a little restaurant, Angel's Pizza, off Versailles Road, and I kept going over there. That's how I met his daughter, Tiana. He introduced me to her."

John and Tiana have been married more than three years now.

When he's away from Kroger, John enjoys going to Mexican restaurants and conversing in Spanish with the owners and employees. What he enjoys most is "spending time with my wife and our families, listening to music and talking to friends."

John has an older brother who lives in Louisville and a late sister, who died of breast cancer at 37.

"We scattered her ashes in Hawaii," John says.

John says he doesn't have any big dreams.

"I'm happy just taking the cards God dealt me," he says.

He recently earned third place in a St. Jude Hospital fundraiser at Kroger " asking customers if they would like to make a donation " and received a stadium blanket, an emergency roadside kit and an electronic picture frame.

He knows speed is important in the checkout lanes, "and I'm the slowest checker here," he says.

John will keep trying to improve his speed while continuing to do the little extras " like separately bagging chicken and steaks, double-wrapping fragile items, and showing politeness to every customer he meets.

"Frankfort Faces" is a series that highlights people from within the Frankfort and Franklin County community. Each feature follows one of the city's most unique personalities and includes a story, photos and video, which can be found by clicking the TV icon attached to the story online at state-journal.com.