New at Vons: Loaves in the Fast Lane : Retailing: The supermarket chain is offering drive-up service in a pilot project aimed at those who want to eat and not run in.
You pull up to the drive-through menu board and a disembodied voice floats out into the night with a pleasant, “May I have your order please?” You consult the list in your wallet and begin:
“I’ll take a box of Tide, a six-pack of Heineken, a five-pound bag of Gold Medal Flour, a box of Milk Bones and some Huggies diapers. Oh, and a cheeseburger, please, to go.”
Welcome to the brave new world of Vons Drive-Thru Express, a kind of McDonald’s of the supermarket sphere that opens today in Pasadena in an effort to deliver to customers the staples they want the most--speed and convenience.
Vons is one of a growing number of markets and convenience stores throughout the country tinkering with the concept of grocery shopping by car. To date, industry experts say, no one has gotten it quite right; several early incarnations already have failed.
“The concept has a lot of appeal out there because drive-through-type eating places are so popular,” said Don Beaver, president of the California Grocers Assn. “There have been others who have tried it, but either they’ve been ahead of their time, in wrong locations or the pricing or selection has not been right.”
After spending 18 months and nearly $300,000 on development, Vons officials hope they can get the equation right with their new 24-hour service. Although it’s just an experiment to date, Vons Drive-Thru Express hopes to cut into the market dominated by the likes of Atlantic Richfield’s am/pm mini-markets and Southland’s 7-Eleven stores.
The Southland Corp. operates three drive-through 7-Elevens in Florida, Washington and Missouri but is too short on capital to expand its program further into the 7,000-branch chain. At Roth’s IGA Foodliners in Salem, Ore., customers can fax in their orders and then motor up to a drive-through window for pickup. The service has been available for only eight months.
Grocery Express in San Francisco caters to high-end clients who want to fill their refrigerators without even getting into their cars, let alone getting out. The 8-year-old company accepts orders via phone, fax and computer and then delivers the goods at the customer’s convenience.
One of the earliest experiments in drive-through shopping was the Phone In-Drive Thru Market in West Los Angeles. The company made a stab at business in 1983 but closed after only 11 months.
Phil Hawkins, Vons’ vice president for sales, was store manager at a nearby Vons outlet when the Phone In-Drive Thru Market opened its driveway for business. As Hawkins watched the small company die, he learned how not to operate a convenience store operation. And he applied those lessons to the Vons Drive-Thru Express, which is his brainchild.
“People are very selective when it comes to picking their steak, their head of lettuce,” Hawkins said, so the Vons drive-through currently does not plan to offer such perishable items. “But if we get requests for those items, we will make them available.”
What can you get at the drive-through market? About 1,400 brand-name items from Arm & Hammer baking soda through Kraft Miracle Whip, all the way to Woolite. There’s pet food and baby food, film and flour, canned meats and cosmetics--all at the same prices found in the regular grocery sections.
But there’s a hitch--two actually. The first is that while you can order an unlimited amount of fast food at the drive-through window, you can only get 10 general grocery items per trip. The reason is simple; this is an express service and Hawkins wants to get customers in and out in three minutes.
The second is more subtle. You may be able to order, say, laundry soap through Vons Drive-Thru Express, but there’s a chance that it won’t be your brand.
“You can get anything at Vons Drive-Thru Express that you can get in the larger store,” Hawkins said. “But it’s only one brand, usually the No. 1 brand. People in a hurry are not brand loyal.”
The drive-through is an outgrowth of two earlier Vons experiments, one that placed miniature convenience stores in full-sized Vons markets and one that did the same with self-contained fast-food shops.
“Using product (sales) data from those outlets, we took it to the next step and opened this store with the drive-through,” Hawkins said Tuesday, as workers applied the finishing touches to the Pasadena pilot project, which offers convenience-store service to both walk-in and drive-through customers.
“We think we can offer something different in the store,” he said, “and compete with 7-Eleven and am/pm at the same time.”
The competition doesn’t seem worried, either. “We respect Vons,” said Al Greenstein, a spokesman for Arco, which operates 730 am/pm mini-markets. “They’re a very good marketer. But we feel we can hold our own against Vons, and we will continue to expand our operation.”
