Hank Meijer
Source of wealth: Supermarkets
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Modules
Biography
Hank Meijer owns Michigan-based grocery chain Meijer with his two brothers Doug and Mark.
Meijer has 500 stores in the Midwest and estimated revenues of $22 billion.
Hank and his brother served as co-CEOs from 1990 to 2017.
All three brothers are on Meijer's board. Hank is executive chairman.
His grandfather Henrik, a Dutch immigrant, started the company in 1934.
Hank's son Peter Meijer, one of 10 Republicans to vote to impeach Donald Trump, lost his primary to seek re-election to Congress in August 2022.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Hank Meijer
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Hank Meijer, linked to Fashion & Retail and 'Supermarkets', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 51 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 3.2 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.