Supermarket at Your DoorSafeway Stores, the giant...

Supermarket at Your Door

Safeway Stores, the giant Northern California food retailer that owns 35% of Vons Cos., today begins offering a service that is available at only a handful of groceries in the Southland: home delivery.

Called Safeway Express, the new service allows customers to phone or fax orders to a toll-free number for same-day ($12.50) or next-day ($11.95) delivery. Senior citizens can get next-day service for $9.95.

The service could prove challenging to the clerks charged with filling the orders. The director of marketing for Shopper’s Express in Bethesda, Md., which Safeway has hired to provide the service, told the San Francisco Chronicle that orders can be quite specific. “Customers can actually say they want six bananas--two ripe, two medium, two green,” she said.

Boy, I Sure Could Use a Soda

In a move that could inadvertently drive up sales of soft drinks, area motion picture theaters will carry a public service announcement on the consequences of a severe drought.

The 60-second spot, created for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, depicts a “nightmare” situation in which a thirsty man cannot get water to flow from his faucet, shower and hose.

The spot will play on more than 150 screens and will be seen by more than 2 million theatergoers during the months of August and September. Participating theater chains include Pacific Theatres, Laemmle Theatres, Metropolitan Theatres, AMC Entertainment and United Artists Theatres.

The creators of the spot, which is titled “Imagine,” said they hope it will remind moviegoers of the need to conserve water as California suffers through its fourth year of drought conditions. Soft drink sales are not listed among their motives.

Let’s Meet After Our Meeting

California companies’ penchant for meetings has long been parodied with the phrase “let’s take a meeting.”

But now there’s proof that among personnel directors, at least, there are few places across the country where work weeks are more filled with meetings than on the West Coast. A recent survey by Heidrick and Struggles shows that “human resources executives,” as they’re now called, in the West spend an average of 18.4 hours per week in meetings, and another three hours getting ready for them. Only their counterparts in the South topped them; they reported spending 18.9 hours a week in meetings. And how do they feel about it? Well, 81% rated the time spent in meetings as “productive.”