Shorting the Sale

The juicy, well-marbled rib roast on the cover of the Atlantic Monthly's March issue looks tasty enough, but the magazine did not appeal to executives at Safeway Stores, Inc., the nation's largest supermarket chain (1975 sales: $9.7 billion). After a memo alerting stores to the issue went out from the chain's Oakland, Calif, headquarters last month, some Safeway stores removed the magazine from their newsstand shelves.

What bothered the company about the issue was an unflattering account of food industry merchandising and meat-labeling practices. The 5,000-word article, titled "RipOff at the Supermarket" and excerpted from a forthcoming book on the food industry by Pop-Sociologist John Keats (The Sheepskin Psychosis, The Insolent Chariots), does not mention Safeway specifically. While denying that the company actually banned the magazine, Safeway spokesmen do say, without going into specifics, that they found the article to be "anti-industry" in posture--as indeed it was. Although it contained some roundhouse generalities (the food industry operates in a "moral swamp," and "supermarket people take us for fools"), the story focused largely on one independent store-owner's account of shady retail practices, such as short-weighting meat and passing off inferior fish as sole.

"We don't question [Safeway's] right to sell what they please," said Publisher Garth Hite. "But it is kind of depressing to think that they would treat ideas as if they were mere bottles of catsup."

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