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FRESH BLOSSOMS

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Carr Gottstein Foods here is picking flowers to underscore its redoubled commitment to excellence in the fresh arena.Long a leader in perishables merchandising here, the 39-unit chain is "building on existing strengths" in fresh by bolstering variety, adding upscale products and taking customer service to new levels in all its fresh departments.Floral heads the effort in all new

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Carr Gottstein Foods here is picking flowers to underscore its redoubled commitment to excellence in the fresh arena.

Long a leader in perishables merchandising here, the 39-unit chain is "building on existing strengths" in fresh by bolstering variety, adding upscale products and taking customer service to new levels in all its fresh departments.

Floral heads the effort in all new stores and in remodels, according to Larry Hayward, president of Carr Gottstein.

The chain redesigned and expanded its floral departments and pulled them up front. Huge walk-in coolers and low-profile refrigerated display cases play starring roles in the new arrangement, as do open production and more on-the-selling-floor customer service.

"Perishables have been a priority for us for a long, long time. Over the years, we have built some very skilled people who understand our mission to provide the highest quality, fresh products in the market. We try to differentiate ourselves with those departments," said Hayward.

What's more, growing competition in Carr Gottstein's market areas has the company continually raising the bar in its fresh departments.

While Carr Gottstein still holds onto a dominant chunk of market share here, the growing presence of the likes of Wal-Mart Superstores, Fred Meyer Inc. food stores, Kmart and club stores such as Costco and Sam's Club, has made it necessary to work harder to maintain an edge, Hayward said.

In the fresh departments, he said, "We want to be known as a full-line provider. We've carved out a niche that way. We've put a real focus on variety and the premium quality of everything.

"For example, we're the only one in the market that has open, iced seafood bars, and we've recently put in Coleman natural beef," Hayward said, referring to the branded fresh beef line based in Colorado that is all-natural and guaranteed free of antibiotics or growth hormones. "We actually sent all our meat managers to Coleman [in Colorado]. They went through the plants and watched them testing for hormones."

Merchandising the products appealingly is a hallmark at Carr Gottstein. Iced seafood tables offer up towering displays of king crab legs that are eye-catchers, and piled-high meat displays feature a huge number of value-added items such as kabobs and stuffed pork chops. The cases are routinely garnished with fresh flowers.

Mass displays show off the best of the best in the produce department, too. "In surveys, we've found that we're the market leader in perishables," Hayward noted.

The executive boasted that the company's fresh produce, including organics and exotics, rivals products in upscale departments anywhere.

"People from the lower 48 come in here and look around and ask us how we do it. They say our produce looks better than theirs," he said. (They "do it" by relying on a carefully cultivated distribution system; see related story.)

Putting produce in a starring role leads the customer into the store in the midst of bright color, Hayward said. And when the chain's flagship unit in the Huffman area of Anchorage was remodeled last year, a major consideration was putting new emphasis on the floral department.

"When you walk into the store, we want you to see 'fresh.' At Huffman, you walk into a fresh cut of flowers, and then into produce."

Floral is usually a high-performance department for the Carr's stores. "We do a tremendous floral business. That's a segment of our business that keeps growing, and we've continued to upgrade it. We bring flowers in from all over the world."

Hayward pointed out that floral is particularly important in Alaska where the winters are long and, for at least part of the year, daylight is scarce.

"I think that here it is particularly nice to walk in and see all that color. It makes your whole shopping experience feel good," he said. And Alaskans here are extremely enthusiastic when it comes to buying flowers.

"It's not unusual to have a regular customer who'll come in and spend $40 or $50 every week [on cut flowers] because they want the color in their house," he said.

Carr Gottstein's floral specialist, Christine Wirz, puts it this way: "There are only three months a year that people can grow flowers in their gardens, so they appreciate being able to get them from us and they buy the most colorful and fragrant varieties there are.

"People here don't buy white flowers much, because white is all they see all winter. We've got so we don't even put white flowers in arrangements because people want bright colors. That's what they're interested in."

Wirz said the chain has the best floral selection in Anchorage. While that opinion may not sound surprising coming from a Carr employee, Wirz is also a certified floral designer with years of experience managing floral shops prior to joining Carr Gottstein eight years ago.

"We have 15 varieties of long-stemmed roses all the time, and we bring in tropicals like the bird of paradise and tuber roses and fresh orchids from Hawaii," she said.

The chain's customers are so interested that they've begun to ask for roses by name. "Actually, that's part of our educating the customer. We have little cards in front of the roses that give the name for them, such as the 'movie star' or the 'kiko,' and now customers come in and ask for them by name," Wirz said. "Kiko" roses are hot pink and the "movie star" roses are bright orange, she added.

In another effort to educate consumers, the chain's floral departments tell customers how to dry another top favorite -- peonies -- so they can enjoy them longer into the year.

"Customers buy a lot of peonies. They're colorful, some are hot pink, and there's magenta, and peach colors, and they're also big. Besides that, you can dry them," Wirz said.

On handouts, the company tells customers they can dry the flowers by hanging them upside down and spraying them with hair spray.

"We even hang some upside down, over the display in the department, so we can point out how to do it."

Wirz said color-hungry customers here respond particularly well to the first shipments of daffodils and tulips, which come in during January.

"You wouldn't believe the quantities of daffodils and tulips we sell. People are so glad to see them. We ran a special on daffodils this year when they first came out," she said, adding that just in the 15 of the chain's stores that are in Anchorage the company sold thousands and thousands of bunches in the first few days after delivery.

She attributed some of the sales success to the floral departments' impressive displays. "You just saw a solid wall of yellow when you came in. They had huge displays, and they had yellow balloons all over. I think that has a lot to do with it," Wirz said.

SN spoke to Wirz just as the chain's floral departments were bracing themselves for the Mother's Day rush. "Mother's Day is extremely big here," she said.

The holiday is second only to Valentine's Day in terms of floral sales at Carr Gottstein, and it keeps getting better, she said.

For Mother's Day weekend, the chain doubled its staff of service personnel in its floral departments and had at least one or two associates on duty all night the night before Mother's Day.

All the chain's stores are open 24 hours a day, but on a regular day, the floral department is staffed only from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Later at night, customers can choose arrangements or bouquets from self-service displays. Produce department associates are on the alert for floral customers who need help, Wirz said.

At this point, only 10 of the chain's stores have full-service floral departments. That means that all arrangements are designed on-site and that each of those stores has two or three certified designers, plus support staff, at work during the day. The chain's aim is to eventually roll out full-service floral departments to nearly all its stores, Wirz said. The possible exceptions would be smaller stores in very rural locales, but many existing stores, even before they're remodeled, will be retrofitted with some of the aspects of the prototype floral department here at the chain's flagship store.

At that store, the floral department was redesigned to bring designers into closer contact with customers, Wirz said. The first element customers see when they enter the door is a fully staffed service floral counter banked in front by an expanse of very low-profile, tiered, refrigerated cases that hold a myriad of colorful cut flowers.

The configuration of the work area in relation to the actual counter was changed to enable designers to face customers as they work on floral arrangements and care for cut flowers.

Another feature in the Huffman unit is a walk-in cooler that covers between 400 and 500 square feet, and can hold up to 60 arrangements displayed on glass shelves.

"Customers can walk right into it from the sales floor," Wirz said. The unit is separated only by an air curtain from the main floor. The cooler has also been added at several other stores.

Customers like the cooler because there's plenty of room for them to stand back and look at the arrangements and to choose cut flowers, she added.

An open-air feeling has been added to the department, too, by taking out an octagonal glass case that had stood in its middle.

"We've replaced that with the very low cases in front of the service counter. Now you can see into other departments. You see produce, right away," Wirz said.

Just as other fresh departments are currently looking to increase their variety, floral chainwide has boosted its variety by what Wirz estimated as 30% over the last two years.

The variety at the flagship store here hasn't increased by that much because the selection was already huge there, however. "It's more the other stores that are adding to their variety. We encourage them to try new things, like the tropicals. You don't know if it will work if you don't try it, we tell them," Wirz said.

That's part of upscaling a department, she said, but along with it consumers must be educated with signs and informational materials that tell them about new varieties of cut flowers and plants, and Carr Gottstein is doing that.

In another upscaling -- and margin-raising -- move, the chain has recently begun to create floral arrangements in designer vases and containers.

"We're bringing in more frosted vases and some cobalt blues, and also some ceramic urns and bowls. We're even using upscaled pot covers on our 6-inch plants.

We're trying to get away from being seen as a traditional supermarket floral department," Wirz said.

In that regard, the chain is moving further away from premade bouquets. "Our single-stem sales are going up. Customers like to hand-pick their bouquets themselves and our designers are there to help them if they want some help choosing," Wirz said.

She added that the top level of customer service in its floral departments takes Carr Gottstein a few rungs above others. Not just other supermarkets, but stand-alone floral shops, too, Wirz said.

"Maybe it's because we have to try harder. If a customer walks into a regular floral shop, they're going to buy something. But here we have to snag them when they may have just come to the store to buy bananas," she added.

For that reason, excellent customer service is a particular key to success in floral, Wirz said. Selling skills are a must and she chooses her associates accordingly. "I look for people who interact well."

Carr's president, Larry Hayward, said the chain is currently gearing up to put all department managers through a new training series that will focus on customer service. "Our approach is to have people in each department that have expertise. To be successful in the perishables side of the business, you have to invest the proper amount of labor." It is part of the philosophy that has helped the chain create its niche, Hayward said, based on quality, service, selection and price, in that order.

TAGS: Center Store