The Super Supermarket

"The function of the supermarket is to provide the housewife with all the necessities--for her table, her home, her family." Thus Lansing P. Shield, president of Grand Union Co., last week set forth the big goal of Grand Union. With 46 giant new stores to be opened this year, Shield will invade the provinces of the hardware and the drug stores, push forward into the catchall domain of the dime store, turn the modern supermarket into a junior self-service department store.

In the hierarchy of giant grocery chains, Grand Union, with 342 stores scattered over eight Eastern Seaboard states, ranks well down the list in tenth place. But in the art of lively merchandising it yields first place to no one. It was the first big supermarket chain to mechanize food shelves, first to try trading stamps in the hotly competitive Metropolitan New York market. When it adds clothing departments next month, Grand Union will give more space to nonfood items than any other big chain. By moving beyond the traditional grocery lines into dry goods, readymade clothing and home furnishings, Lansing Shield has brought about a sharp change in supermarketing, and made Grand Union one of the fastest-growing chains in the nation.

Grand Union sales rose 29% to $283 million last year, earnings 25% to $3,584,-125. Shield hopes to boost his gross another $75 million this year. But he is far more than an enterprising grocer. He is a director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, and headed the 20-man Puerto Rico Food Advisory Commission, which worked out a master plan to speed native-grown food from farm to table. His latest project: organize the U.S. grocery group that will set up a fully stocked supermarket to go on display at Rome's fairgrounds this summer, thus give an older world a new look at U.S. products and salesmanship.

Under New Management. Born in upstate New York, Shield graduated from Rutgers ('17), and after service as a test pilot during World War I, landed a job with A. & P. as an accounting clerk and rose to general auditor in four years. In 1924 J. Spencer Weed, a onetime A. & P. vice president, hired him away to be contrailer of the venerable, 500-store Jones Brothers Tea Co. Four years later, after Weed and Shield had put Jones Brothers in the black, they regrouped it with several smaller chains into Grand Union Co. But over the years, Weed and Shield began to disagree strongly on whether Grand Union should convert its small, over-the-counter stores into self-service supermarkets. After powerful stockholders backed Shield in 1946, Weed retired and Shield took over.

Shield came in with a hatful of ideas, soon turned them into cash-register receipts. He systematically pruned away drab and inefficient old stores, studied population trends and home-building statistics to spot his new supermarkets. As the U.S. family moved to suburbia, Shield also packed up, moved his staff and executive offices out of downtown Manhattan to the heart of a shopping center in mushrooming East Paterson, N.J., where he built a glass-and-cut-stone emporium that chain-store experts refer to as "a mecca for supermarket operators." It is not only a thumping success in dollar sales, but it has become a handy proving ground for every new product and promotion idea.

Round the Clock. A part-time inventor, Shield used the East Paterson store to try out his patented Food-O-Mat, a block of tiered ramps that feed cans and jars to customers by gravity and save up to 40% of floor space. To solve the traffic problem inside his stores, Shield broke the conventional supermarket pattern of long, parallel shelves and narrow aisles. For his new layout he had architects design short, boxy shelves, spot them in irregular arcs to create broad aisles and thereby eliminate bottlenecks for grocery carts.

But to Shield, the big change in super-marketing is not in functional display, but in new lines. To a conventional grocery in Keansburg, N.J.. Shield is now building a 20,000-sq-ft. addition that will sell only nonfood items. With one shopping cart the housewife can move from hardware to florist, from drugs to dry goods. In addition to women's and children's inexpensive clothing, the Keansburg store will offer cameras, costume jewelry, fishing rods, toasters, even outdoor lawn furniture. Five years from now, says Shield, every new supermarket will be a small department store; round-the-clock vending machines will sell such necessities as bread, butter and eggs; merchandise will move out of automated warehouses in 40-case lots. Says he: "You can't have a highly modern production plant with a horse-and-buggy distribution system. The supermarket will revolutionize our buying habits--and the revolution is just beginning."

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