Dude, We’re Not in the ol’ A&P; Anymore

I’m here at the new Ralphs in West Hollywood. I’m standing in front of a self-service Mediterranean olive bar, where, for $5.99 a pound, customers can load up on pimento, stuffed martini, black Greek, sun-dried black Greek, Nafplion, picholine, Nicoises, almond, garlic-stuffed, black garlic-stuffed . . . . I’ve got nothing against olives, but why do I have this Dorothy-in-Oz feeling? * “Olives are a very big product,” says the proud wizard at my elbow, Mark Miale, manager of Service Deli Merchandising for Ralphs, the state’s largest supermarket chain. “We probably do a couple hundred pounds a week.” * I watch dumbfounded as an older woman in thick white stockings shovels a couple dozen into a container. “I get these for my cat,” she confides. “It’s the only people food he likes. He won’t eat steak, but he loves seasoned deli olives.” And if her tabby craved kumquats, or yucca root, or porcini mushrooms or pistachio oil, the store would be equally accommodating. * Whoever said the ‘90s are the decade of limitations has obviously not set foot in a Southern California supermarket lately. Guaranteed low-price and double-coupon wars have expanded into a battle over who can provide the widest variety of extravagant foods and services. Uber grocers such as Bristol Farms, Gelson’s Markets and Pavilions woo customers with champagne gift baskets, takeout baba ghanoush, valet parking, cappuccino bars and cooking classes taught by Julia Child and Paul Prudhomme--and now, even at the lowliest conventional markets, picnics to go, salad bars and sushi are commonplace.

Lucky caters parties. Vons is the largest retail seller of flowers in California. Hughes will count, sort and give you credit for your empty Sparkletts bottle filled with loose change. All the big chains are putting in banks. Customers at the new Calabasas Gelson’s can recover from the stress of deciding between paper or plastic in not one, but two cozy lounge areas, complete with comfortable chairs and fireplaces. Pavilions delivers groceries that you can order online. Bristol Farms will cryo-freeze a month’s worth of meals to feed you as you sail off to Bali on your yacht.

And as Southern California (the most competitive supermarket market) goes, so goes the nation. My sister reports from Texas that there’s a pianist playing a baby grand in the produce department of her local Tom Thumb. (I imagine a medley of “Food, Glorious Food” and “Yes! We Have No Bananas.”)

Grocers are reluctant to speak of the reasons behind the bells and whistles for fear of tipping off the competition. (In fact, in all my years of journalism, I’ve never run into such a tight-lipped bunch. Even the most innocuous facts in this article took at least three conversations to uncover, and I’m convinced it would be easier to crack the CIA’s latest code than to learn how many cartons of Gelson’s bottled water are sold in a given week.) Fortunately--as another example of the industry’s more-is-more philosophy--supermarket studies have become an academic specialty. (I received 18 responses to my Internet query.)

“Supermarkets are being creative trying to capture new forms of business,” explains James H. Stevenson, director of the Food Industry Management Program at USC. “Other forms of competition--convenience stores and the big club stores like Wal-Mart, Price Club, Petco--have cut into sales. And for the first time in history, the dollars spent for food outside the home are about the same as dollars spent for food in the home. People are eating out in restaurants more, and that business came out of the supermarkets’ pockets. So now, markets are looking for new niches and putting in new services, like lobster tanks, Chinese kitchens and video rentals.”

“Historically, supermarkets all competed to give the lowest possible price,” says John Stanton, professor of food marketing at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. “They could keep this up as long as there was a little more profit they could give away. But now prices can’t get any lower, and supermarkets are saying: ‘Wait a minute, we have to do something else to make people like our markets. We have to make our markets fun.’ ”

Fun? Perhaps I’m not their target shopper. I consider grocery shopping to be an odious task, only one notch above getting my driver’s license renewed at the DMV. I spend a ridiculous amount of money on items that will disappear in under a week. And no matter how much I dislike the task, it never goes away.

This, of course, is why supermarkets knock themselves out to promote customer loyalty. Supermarkets operate on a slim profit margin, traditionally only 1% of a sale, due to stiff competition and the high number of perishable goods. (Items lost to spoilage are known as the “shrink” and are figured into the price.) But that 1% adds up. A big supermarket, according to USC’s Stevenson, can gross $1 million a week in sales.

“What supermarkets are trying to do is get away from interchangeable identities,” says Jim Lattin, the supermarket specialist from Stanford. “If we’re both offering Tide, then we’re each going to undercut the other. But if you’re offering catering and I’m offering deli, we’re sort of different. We split the market and attract different sets of customers.”

For example, the lovelorn. “We have practically everything you need for a great relationship,” says Mary McAboy of Vons and Pavilions. “Supermarkets have long been known as a great place to meet people. You could surreptitiously check someone out over the cantaloupes. But now our wine department sponsors tastings at local restaurants, so you can go on a first date. Some branches have jewelry stores, so you could buy the engagement ring, and others have travel agencies so you could plan the honeymoon. And we can bake the two-tiered wedding cake and process the wedding photos.”

A law office for a quickie supermarket divorce would also be a profitable addition, if shopping with my husband, Duke, is any indication. My husband, a sometime restaurant critic and persistent cook, likes to go exploring, checking what’s new, what’s good-looking and--most of all--what’s cheap. By contrast, I’m a commando shopper. I do not read labels, I do not check prices, I dump what I need in the cart and split. Then again, as Duke points out, I don’t cook.

Clearly, I’m not alone. “All the changes relate to the fact that there are more working women with less time to slave over a stove,” says Judie Decker, a representative for Lucky. “In the meat department you see prepared entrees, stuffed green peppers, pork chops. In the produce department you see things like vegetables already peeled and packaged and ready to put on the plate.” (I believe the person who invented those bags of pre-washed, pre-cut salad greens deserves the Nobel Prize. Gelson’s now sells 8,000 bags a week.)

At the West Hollywood Ralphs, the menu is more upscale. Mark Miale proudly shows me an immaculate self-service salad-entree bar, where for $5.99 a pound, a time-stressed customer can load up on wild rice, Greek vegetables with feta, fettuccine with Oriental beef or albacore herb salad. The most popular salads are the Mediterranean pasta and the seafood Louie made of orange roughy, shrimp and “krab,” a white fish that has been magically transformed to impersonate crab. “It’s a crab-like product at a good retail price,” Miale says. I’m more impressed that a customer can pay for their seafood Louie or their create-your-own-pizza or their black forest ham-and-brie sandwich at the deli counter and avoid a wait in line.

Ralphs’ mainstream stock is displayed on conventional shelving, but the food-fetishist fare is showcased on trendy wrought-iron racks so that Uncle Ben’s rice doesn’t mingle with Southwestern Basmati. The layout of the entire market is dictated by the main office, which does extensive top-secret research to determine where products should go and sends in a “Mission Impossible”-like special-retail-merchandising crew to set up the aisles. (Local stores are allowed to change displays at the ends of the aisle.) “Studies show that products displayed at eye level or on the end caps have the greatest likelihood of movement,” says Arun Jain, the University of Buffalo’s food-marketing maven.

Increasingly, supermarkets are charging companies a fee, called a slotting allowance, to put their products in a power shelf position. “It’s almost like manufacturers are renting the space,” says UCLA’s expert, David Bell, who wrote his dissertation on how people choose markets. “There are thousands of products, and they all want to get on the shelf. If you’re a small manufacturer, you can get shut out. Snapple, for example, came out with an innovative product, and they couldn’t get on the shelf. What they did was to bypass the retailer and go directly to the consumer. When people started asking ‘Where’s the Snapple?’ the retailers had to let them in.”

Markets work overtime to cater to the needs of their communities, because a convenient location is still the biggest incentive for a consumer to shop in a store. The hottest concept at the West Hollywood Ralphs is a full-service juice bar where the health-conscious can slurp Blueberry Rush Chillers and Tropical Splash Smoothies. (Additives like bee pollen, ginseng and antioxidants cost an extra quarter.) The store recently ran a special on melatonin and sold out.

The juice bar clerk is harvesting blades of wheat grass from a growing flat and stuffing them in a blender. I’ve tasted wheat grass, and it’s like drinking your lawn. “We probably go through four flats a day,” says Miale, explaining that an ounce has more than 100 minerals and nutrients.

Wheat grass notwithstanding, I believe that only one market in the city has my best interests at heart; that’s Gelson’s, the nine-store chain that Joan Didion once called “the za-zen of markets.” I adore Gelson’s, not because if I need to throw a party, I can pick up artichokes Florentine, mushrooms stuffed with Dungeness crab or a side of poached salmon in the deli counter, but rather because it’s a bastion of cleanliness, orderliness and civility in a chaotic world. It’s soothing to walk through the St. Peter’s Basilica of produce departments and behold the hand-stacked, unblemished Comice pears, precisely lined up like Rockettes. Over the intercom, a cashier summons a clerk to “Please bring an Enquirer to Check Stand 3,” and in a flash, an acolyte appears with tabloid in hand. They even have a special tub that chills wine in five minutes.

The other day, I went looking for an inflatable bath pillow and had a choice of three models. If there’s a wait in the checkout line, all I have to do is raise an eyebrow at the manager, who instantly opens up another line. The aisles are clearly marked and extra wide, like Parisian boulevards. “Actually, our aisles are average size, 6 feet,” says John Vitale, vice president of perishables. “We just won’t put anything down the aisle to encumber you on your trip. You won’t find a pole that holds up the roof or a display in the aisle. Your flow is very important to us.”

The shopping carts are never sticky, and they run as smoothly as race cars at Daytona. “We have a maintenance team that services them regularly,” Vitale says. “They make sure there are no wobbles, and you never get the kind you can’t push. Then our carts are steam-cleaned with temperatures over 210 degrees so they’re sanitized.”

I reward Gelson’s for their attention to detail. When the genial clerk in the European seafood department (where the fish is artfully posed on ice, like a still life) says, “Margo, it’s a little over, do you mind?” I shrug and say, “No problem.” All the extra ounces of shrimp I’ve purchased could probably finance another branch, but it doesn’t bother me a bit. The prices at Gelson’s give my husband a nosebleed, but he doesn’t balk at eating strawberries in November if he doesn’t know what they cost, so I shop without him.

Still, the hands-down winner for L.A.’s most extravagant market goes to Bristol Farms--a Disneyland for the orally fixated. “This is not a supermarket,” says President Lou Kwiker. “It’s a food store for people who love food.” Indeed, the Manhattan Beach branch is jammed with more than 13,000 specialty items such as choke cherry jelly (so named because if you eat too much, you get the symptoms of strep throat), Kobe beef from Japan ($129 a pound) and black truffles ($18.50 an ounce, but they sell 6 pounds a week). The bustling store is as mesmerizing as a carnival midway. There aren’t just bagels, there’s an entire Western Bagel outlet. The sushi department, the No. 1 sushi retailer in Southern California, goes through 2,000 pounds of rice and 500 pounds of ginger a week and sells 600 tuna, California and cucumber rolls a day. Each store has a private sausage maker that churns out more than 30 varieties. I actually felt guilty for not consuming chanterelle mushrooms on a regular basis.

A customer like me, who gets confused when confronted with nine shades of white at the paint store, will become downright catatonic when forced to choose between 1,000 types of fine wine, 300 varieties of olive oil and olive oil blends, 300 different cheeses, 100 blends of tea (but not Lipton’s) and 70 vinegars ranging in price from $2 to $250. In the mood for chutney? (What is chutney anyway?) They have peach, banana, curried fruit, apple-pear, cranberry-walnut, apricot-hazelnut, plum pepper, mango and lime.

All these chutneys are tracked by computer, though Bristol Farms has only recently installed the scanning system that has revolutionized the industry. “Every product in the store, every bar code, every deli offering, had to be input in the item master file at the main office, which, in turn, sends the information to the registers in the stores,” Kwiker explains. I was amazed that there wasn’t a universal stocking program--SupermarketMaster--that contains the bulk of the information that the retailer needs. Though I suppose, since 50% of their stock is exclusive to Bristol Farms, it wouldn’t do them much good.

Kwiker continues: “Say you buy a bottle of Naya spring water. The computer needs to know what size, how many are packed to a case, who the supplier is, the weight of the bottle, the case weight, the dimensions, the retail price. When you buy swordfish at the fish counter, the computer has to be able to tell the scale how much the fish costs per pound. And we spend a tremendous amount of time sourcing products outside the United States. They don’t have bar codes in Italy; we had to create them. It took us months to input all the information.”

It’s well worth the effort, because scanners do a lot more than cut your wait in line. Scanners provide retailers with precise information as to who bought what product at what time in what quantity, so that they’re not stuck with merchandise that doesn’t move well. It also speeds up ordering, as Mike Vriens, the store director at Ralphs, explains. “Our guns scan the item itself or the bar code on the shelf, and that information is downloaded into a computer, which, in turn, sends it to the host computer in our main office, which electronically sends it to the warehouse, which prints out a hard copy and starts plucking the order.”

Despite its high-tech system, Bristol Farms is down-homey. The personnel (known as “owner partners” because they’re required to buy stock in the company) are all decked out in blue jeans and red-checked shirts and have the bubbly enthusiasm of characters in a Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney musical. Instead of wanting to put on a show, they want you to make a good dinner. Their sales technique is infectious; they keep feeding you. I ambled into the produce section--past the Brussels sprouts on a stalk and the Model-T Ford piled high with gourds, pumpkins and nuts--and stopped in front of a pomelo. Instantly, the produce manager plucked one from the old-fashioned wooden produce basket, peeled it, handed me a slice and delivered a brief history of the fruit. In the course of 20 minutes, I was invited to sample coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice, Fuji apples and the newest concoction from the deli kitchen, Ginger with Tiger Shrimp.

The prices of these items are discreetly stamped on the bottom; a customer is forced to pick it up and look. “We don’t have aisle numbers either,” says Mike D’Angelo, the specialty food director. “We deliberately make this place a maze. You come here and have to ask, ‘Where is this?’ We make it a point to communicate with the customers. To educate them.”

I really don’t care where my turkey grew up or the name of the captain who caught my Chilean sea bass, but they wore me down. I stare at some mustard. “What flavor do you feel you like?” D’Angelo asks helpfully. “I can present you with a honey dill. Maybe you don’t like dill. How about a garlic honey mustard, or a raspberry honey mustard, or maybe green peppercorn garlic mustard sounds interesting?”

I return home laden with grocery bags filled with food products that I’d never heard of. I spent twice what I spent at the Barney’s sale. “So what do you want for dinner?” Duke asks.

“Please,” I sigh, “can’t we just eat out?”