It is not every day you see a supermarket owner on the shop floor stacking shelves, manning the tills and even sweeping up the front entrance.

But then again Giorgio Zanol, president of the Lindo's Group of Companies, is not your typical supermarket owner.

For the sprightly 67-year-old likes nothing better than to roll his sleeves up and pitch in with the rest of the staff six days a week.

Mr. Zanol's day starts at 7 a.m. and his first job is to go around every department and make sure everything is OK before opening the store at 8 a.m.

Then it is upstairs to the office, in which he admits little time is spent compared to the shop floor, for an hour to check his voicemail and email prior to returning down below, where he spends the rest of the day helping out with everything from sweeping sidewalks to attending to broken machinery and attending the occasional meeting until the store closes at 7 or 8 p.m., when he gets ready for the next day.

"I just make sure that when the customers come in everything is in place and all the staff posts are filled," he said.

"I give a hand to whoever needs it whether in the produce aisles or at the cash register.

"Above all, I make a point that if people ask me for something to make a note and try to get it and, 90 percent of the time, I do.

"No job is too big or small for me and my staff say 'if Giorgio does it, I can do it', so it is a win-win situation for all of us."

Customer service, as with any supermarket boss, is top of Mr. Zanol's agenda, priding himself on knowing his customers and their needs, in many cases several generations of the same family.

"My philosophy is that if you take care of people they will come back — it is the key to success," he said.

"When I left home to come to Bermuda my father trusted to me with his blessing of three things — work hard, be honest and treat people the way you want to be treated and those are the three principles I remember and on that premise we built Lindo's."

Mr. Zanol, who is from Carvalese, a town in the Dolomites, Italy, and is the second eldest in a family of one brother and three sisters, started working at a small hotel during his summer holidays and graduated with a qualification in management at hotel college.

At the age of 17, he moved to Germany and worked in a factory and hotel for two-and-a-half years before leaving for France for one year and then England for two years.

It was in England that Mr. Zanol was offered a job as waiter at the Carlton Beach Hotel in Southampton, Bermuda, which he took up and subsequently met his future wife, and got married in 1966.

He was then given the choice of taking up one of three posts — to work for his father and mother-in-law at their family store in Devonshire, to go back to Italy to work in another hotel or to sell boats in Miami for a contact he made when working as a waiter, captain and wine steward in the Bahamas for two-and-a-half years.

Mr. Zanol, who speaks Italian, English, German and French, and has travelled across Africa, including Zimbabwe and Tanzania, and China, from Beijing to Hong Kong, admitted it was an easy decision to make to join the family business.

"I decided to take the family job and I thought 'What do I know about the grocery business?' — I thought my wife would not have been happy in Italy or Miami away from her family and I reckoned that with my background of dealing with people I would give this a shot," he said.

He joined the company on September 8, 1968 and ran the operation with his brother-in-law William Moniz growing from a family home with a store underneath to 3,000 feet in 1972, 9,000 feet in 1982 and 12,000 feet in 1986, before taking over the Giant Foods shop in Warwick in 1993/94, and then expanding even further at the original site in 2000.

The business itself bloomed from Mr. Zanol, who has two sons, Marco and Andre, and two granddaughters, and Mr. Moniz selling meat, including home made Portuguese chorico, and beef sausages, at the first store to 17 family members in both sites 40 years later.

Among some of his biggest decisions during his time at Lindo's have been not to open on Sundays, because he believes it gives the small stores a chance to boost their income and most importantly, allows employees to spend more time with their family, and the introduction of green bags to cut down on waste from the brown bags.

He has also seen a number of changes over the past few years, mainly in shopper's eating habits as they becoming more health conscious and move away from canned vegetables towards fresh, frozen, dry and organic foods, such as meat and fish.

"At the end of the day, people want quality, cleanliness and prices," he said.

"Right now, with this economic downturn, we have to look at containing the expenses and we have to try to keep the prices as low as possible in these hard times and we have to try and be more productive.

"We have to keep the place clean and to give good service to the customers and for the future we have to listen to the customers about what they want, to give them what they want when they want it and to make sure it is one the shelf.

"It happened in the 1990s and 2000 and this is maybe worse, but we will get through it — Bermudians are pretty tough people."

In his spare time, Mr. Zanol puts on his running shoes and has amassed numerous medals and trophies which adorn his cabinet, from the London and Boston Marathons, which he completed in impressive times of three hours and 36 minutes and two hours and 45 minutes respectively, to a 100-kilometre race in Florence last year and he is fresh back from successfully finishing the Trans-Alpine Run covering 300 gruelling kilometres through Germany, Austria and Italy with his son Marco and daughter-in-law.

He also does a lot of charity work, including the Lindo's to Lindo's race and raised $34,000 during his latest venture at the Trans-Alpine Run.

For now though there is more than enough work to keep him on his toes running proceedings hands-on, on the shop floor.