Special Report: The waitress who brought jobs to GR

By Chris Andrews

GRAND RAPIDS

Around these parts, Carmen Gehring has become known as the server who sealed the deal. The waitress who won over Priceline – and helped snag hundreds of jobs for West Michigan.

But truth is, Gehring isn’t entirely ready to take the bow. She’s talked up Grand Rapids so often that, well, she doesn’t really remember the particular conversation.

“We get a lot of travelers, and a lot of times, they’ll say, ‘This is my first time to Grand Rapids. It’s really nice here,’” Gehring said during a break on a recent afternoon shift. “We’ll talk about some of the great things about the city and some of the people who continue to put money into the city. I talk about how clean it is, how safe it is, how we are 30 minutes from the lake (Lake Michigan). We are a couple of hours from Chicago, if you need to go to Chicago.”

Priceline picked the nearby city of Wyoming over 100 other communities last year for a call center for booking.com, its international online hotel reservation operation. The center opened last fall in the old Siemens Dematic office building and has about 50 employees.

The long-term plans call for about 425 jobs and $7.7 million in investment – a commitment especially welcome in these challenging economic times. It was one of the biggest deals in recent years.

Landing Priceline was a team effort, to be sure. State and local leaders put together an economic development package, including tax incentives, to help win the project.

But Priceline officials also make a point of soliciting person-on-the-street impressions of communities they are considering. Or in this case, waitress-at-the-table observations at dinner during their site visit. Officials cited her enthusiastic endorsement as a factor in their decision. Based on Priceline’s recollection of the conversation, folks have concluded the server was probably Gehring, although she says others are equally enthusiastic.

A native of Idaho, Gehring, 36, has lived and worked in West Michigan for a dozen years. While attending Boise State University, she became friends with a group from Grand Rapids, heard good things, and moved back to Michigan with them. She’s been talking up the area ever since.

At Tre Cugini, a fine dining Italian restaurant in downtown Grand Rapids, she often serves out-of-town business executives staying at the J.W. Marriott or the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel. She touts the arts at DeVos Performance Hall, concerts and sports events at Van Andel Arena, cultural opportunities at the city’s museums.

And she is decidedly upbeat about the city’s future.

“If you look around at the skyline, you keep seeing these big cranes that are up in the sky, so you know there is building going on,” she said. “You can tell that people have not given up. They have plans. Things are in the works.”

Gehring’s spirit embodies the pride that most West Michigan residents feel in their community, said Tim Mroz, senior director of communications for The Right Place Inc., the economic development agency that helped put the Priceline deal together. He noted that there are multiple discussion groups on Twitter, Facebook and online blogs touting West Michigan as “a beacon of light in this state and this economy.”

“It’s our job as economic developers to put these deals together to help companies find the right fit in a community, but it is everybody’s job to sell West Michigan,” he said.

“You never know who you are going to meet on the street. When someone asks you for directions, it could be a company locating here. The next time you’re in an airport waiting for a plane, it could actually be a company looking at Michigan.”