SUPERMARKET STRENGTHS - AND WEAKNESSES

SN: What do consumers perceive as the greatest strength and weakness of supermarkets today?

riety and assortment -- they expect to find the same items week in and week out.

But the greatest perceived weakness stems from that strength. Because we have so much variety, consumers expect us to carry ever broader selections, which we can't carry, and that leads to disappointment. HOSEY: The supermarket's greatest strength is the quality and variety of products we offer. As consumers move more toward a convenience-oriented society, their expectations get higher, which leads to a perceived weakness in customer service because of the high expense and demands on consumers' time.

The more we offer to people, the higher their expectations will be, and that can become a problem. As consumers have become more educated and reached higher economic levels, they have changed. They've become more verbal and more aware, and technology has helped raise their expectation levels. And by meeting their expectations, we increase them, and at some point there will be a leveling off. CROWLEY: The supermarket's greatest perceived strength is the quality and variety of foods we carry.

The greatest perceived weakness is the lack of follow-up to questions consumers ask or to requests they make. Many consumers would like to be more involved in the decision-making, and they're unhappy that they're not. For example, they wonder why they aren't consulted when a market redesigns a store, because it may become less convenient from the consumer's standpoint. STEINBACH: What I usually hear as the supermarket's greatest strength is the variety and quality we carry. The greatest weakness I hear is that we don't give them enough food information. People want recipes, simple cooking information and more convenience foods. Basically, they want in-store solutions. MATHEWS: Our strength at Giant is that we're often viewed by consumers as being more responsive to their needs than the government. They come to us as consumer representatives to ask what we do about pesticides, for example, or where we get our beef and how do we know it's safe. One of the positives at Giant is that what we think is important to a lot of people.

Our perceived weakness may be that we can't satisfy every customer 100% of the time. We get a lot of requests for products, but we can't carry everything. NOWAK: Our strength, according to consumers' perceptions, is convenience -- customers can get in and out quicker than at a mass marketer like Meijer's.

Customers perceive our weakness to be a lack of truly one-stop shopping because we don't carry hard lines as Meijer's does.

In the future supermarkets will become more involved in consumers' lives, and they will continue to expect more from supermarkets in terms of convenience, new food trends, nutritional information and more amenities and service departments. MOORE: In many consumers' eyes, the strength of the supermarket is that we're part of the community. We're not only a retailer, but we also work with schools and church groups, and that's a very great strength to which attention isn't always paid.

Within the supermarket, consumers see values from operators they trust and have confidence in, and because they come in so frequently, they develop a loyalty to particular stores and develop relationships that go beyond the products on the shelves. In the process a real trust develops.

The weakness customers perceive is bad service and the way they're treated. This may be somewhat unique in the New York area, where most of our stores are in relatively affluent areas and most associates are from lower-income or poor sections of the city. SCROGGINS: The supermarket's strength is customer loyalty and the satisfaction consumers derive from their local store. They believe supermarkets have what they want when they want it, and as a result they're not shopping at as many different stores as they used to.

We hear the most dissatisfaction expressed about the rudeness of employees and their lack of concern for shoppers' needs. OMERNICK: Our perceived strength is providing more of a one-stop-shopping experience with pharmacies, floral departments, liquor, banks and video. And we've also cleaned up our acts in terms of keeping the stores cleaner in response to food safety requirements and consumer demand, and we're getting to the point that we provide better information to customers about the products we sell.

The weakness consumers perceive at Copps is the need to offer more convenience foods, both in terms of including food courts and offering more heat-and-eat products. At Copps we have a ways to go in that area. SN: How have consumer perceptions of the supermarket's strengths and weaknesses changed over the last few years? MOORE: The Alar scare was the bellwether that signaled a change in consumers' attitudes. Before that there was more concern with price than quality. But media exposes on such subjects as poultry and seafood handling plant seeds of doubt in consumers' minds. MATHEWS: The difference from years past is that customers are more specific now. Their questions are more targeted, and they're willing to question anything that's unusual. McEWAN: Consumer expectations of supermarkets have changed over the years. Today consumers are making greater demands on all service outlets for additional information and holding us more accountable in a way that's new to supermarkets. It's not business as usual now because they ask us to justify why we take the steps we do.

We as a society have pushed the responsibility for selecting safe foods back to the consumer, and they are taking on that responsibility. As a result we have the responsibility to provide for and satisfy those needs.