MISC., YOUR LOCAL non-hiking column, is downright disappointed Washington won’t impose a sports logo tax to help pay for one of Paul Allen’s construction megaprojects. It would’ve been so neat to see people “vote with their pocketbook” and not pay the extra 50 cents or so for the right symbol on their shirts, jackets, duffel bags, etc. Judges would have had to somberly decide whether a cap with Mariner-like colors and the initial “S” really was a Mariners cap. Niketown would have sold T-shirts promoting Michael Jordan only as a cartoon movie star.
THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Little-noticed amid the end of Cyclops was the simultaneous demise of another Belltown eatery, the somewhat more working-class My Suzie’s (successor to the legendary Trade Winds). Its ambience could go from rough-‘n’-tumble to retro-lounge to soul-revival on successive nights. Its closure, allegedly at the pushing of the ex-Sailors Union of the Pacific building’s new owners, makes non-hoity-toity downtown gathering places an even more endangered species. How long will the remaining five or six spots of this type hold on?
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Darn, I hope us Americans can soon get to taste Wacky Vegi brand vegetables. The latest thing in England, these are bags of frozen corn, baby carrots, peas, cauliflower, specially coated with chocolate, pizza, baked-bean, and cheese & onion flavors! Their manufacturer was convinced to launch them by an anti-cancer awareness group, willing to try desperate measures to get more Brit kids to eat their veggies. (Hey, anything would be more appealing than traditional English overboiled food, right?) Speaking of grocery wonders…
IN THE BAG: By the time this comes out, QFC should’ve opened its big new store on Capitol Hill and finished branding its own identity on Wallingford’s once-feisty Food Giant. The new Capitol Hill store was originally to have been a Larry’s Market, but QFC outbid Larry’s at the last minute. (If the retail development had gone as originally planned, we would’ve had Larry just a block away from Moe!) Meanwhile, a strip-mall QFC’s under construction in the formerly rural Snohomish County environs of my childhood, bringing 24-hour, full shopping convenience to a place where a kid used to have to go two miles just to reach a gas station that sold candy bars on the side.
These openings represent small steps in a chain that’s gone in 40 years from a single store on Roosevelt in ’58 (still open) to 15 stores in the mid-’70s (including five taken over when A&P retreated from its last Pacific stores) to 142 stores in Washington and California today. It’s rapidly expanded in the past decade, even as many larger chains retreated from neighborhoods and whole regions. (The once-mighty A&P name now stands over only 675 stores, down from 5,000 in the early ’60s.)
While the new store isn’t QFC’s biggest (that’s the Kmart-sized U Village behemoth), it’s still a useful 45,000-square-foot object lesson in the economics of the foodbiz. The first real supermarkets, in the ’30s, were as small as the First Hill Shop-Rite. New supermarkets kept getting built bigger and bigger ever since, in stages. QFC was relatively late at building ’em huge; in the early ’80s, it proudly advertised how convenient and easy-to-navigate its 15,000-square-foot stores were compared to the big ‘uns Safeway and Albertsons were then building in the suburbs.
Grocery retailing’s a notoriously small-profit-margin business. The profits come from volume, from higher-margin side businesses (wine, deli, in-store bakery), and from gaining the resources to muscle in on wholesaling and processing. QFC started as a Thriftway franchise, part of the Associated Grocers consortium. AG’s one reason indie supermarkets can survive in Washington; it gives individual-store owners and small chains a share in the wholesaler’s piece of the grocery dollar.
What QFC pioneered, and others like Larry’s and the Queen Anne Thriftway have since further exploited, is a “quality” store image. The idea’s that if your store’s known for “better” items and service, you can retreat a little from cutthroat price competition (i.e., charge more). From the Husky-color signs to the old Q-head cartoon mascot (designed by ex-KING weatherman Bob Cram) to the “QFC-Thru” plastic meat trays, every visible aspect of the store’s designed to say “Hey this ain’t no everyday corn-flake emporium.”
Of course, now with everybody in the biz trying to similarly fancy themselves, QFC still has to keep prices in line with the other guys, at least on the advertised staple goods. But it remains a leader in the game of wholesome-yet-upscale brand identity, a shtick most of the now-famous chain retailers from Seattle have adopted; indeed, an image the city itself has tried to impose upon us all.
