Bemidji grocery veteran retires after 60 years at Lueken's Village Foods

Max Hites ended a 60-year run at Lueken's Village Foods on Friday, closing out a career that began before the Bemidji grocer was formally established and stretched across generations of local shoppers.

Lueken's marked the retirement with a public celebration from noon to 1 p.m. at the Lueken's South location, 609 Washington Avenue, where customers were invited in for free cake. The sendoff recognized Hites as the company’s longest-tenured employee and underscored how closely his work has tracked the history of shopping in Bemidji and across Beltrami County.

That history begins in 1966, when Joe Lueken and his brother started Village Foods as a family-owned supermarket in Bemidji. The business now operates two stores, with the South location on Washington Avenue and the North location at 1171 Paul Bunyan Drive NW, serving both sides of town. For many local families, the stores became familiar neighborhood stops long before chain grocery shopping and big-box retail reshaped the market.

Hites’ retirement also lands inside a larger business story. In 2012, Joe Lueken sold the grocery stores to employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, turning the company into an employee-owned business. That decision reflected the culture Joe Lueken had built over 46 years of ownership, a stretch that ended with his death in July 2014 at age 72. Earlier reports said Parkinson’s disease played a role in his decision to retire and pass the company to workers rather than sell to a corporate chain.

The employee-owned model helped tie Lueken’s even more tightly to the community it serves. The company has remained active in local charitable efforts, including its 33rd annual Stuff-A-Truck food drive in November 2024, a sign that the store’s role in Bemidji has extended well beyond the checkout lane. Hites’ retirement put a face on that continuity, showing how frontline workers can become part of a town’s memory as well as its daily routine.

As Bemidji’s grocery landscape continued to change, Hites represented something increasingly rare: one employee whose entire career unfolded inside the same local store family, through the opening of new locations, the shift to employee ownership and decades of customer relationships that still define loyalty in town.