RETAIL GOES GREEN FROM THE GROUND UP

Randy Peacock was just 15 years old when he began working for the Melayer family in Savannah, Ga. He was a bag boy at the M&M Supermarket at Abercorn Plaza, a shopping center that was, as third generation CEO Martin Melaver calls it, "a real high wire act" - the first shopping center development for the family whose roots were in the grocery store business. Abercorn Plaza opened during the height of the 1960s civil rights movement in Savannah, and the shopping center was boycotted because the Melaver family supported desegregation. Nevertheless, it was a great part-time job for a young man who never would have imagined that the shopping center would play such a major role in his future.