Day 33

Friday, March 7, 2008

Today was a long one. We had an extra four hours of Accounting today, with Reuben Davila, talking about the inventory cycle and managerial accounting. I rather enjoyed it, but by the end most of my classmates' eyes were a bit glazed.

After accounting those of us who had gone home over Presidents' Day weekend dashed south to Orange County to meet Tom Arnold for store tours. We started at Trader Joe's, which was nothing new to me, then on to Growers' Direct Produce. Growers' Direct was amazing, just about 6,000 sq. ft. and about 350 SKU's total. The product was the best I've seen down anywhere here and the prices were also the lowest by far - a true category killer.

Next was Mother's Natural Foods which reminded me of a small version of the food coop in Bellingham, except that they had a room to the right as you entered with over 80,000 SKU's (no I didn't add a zero) of vitamins and supplements. I'd guess there was probably well over $1 million of inventory at retail just in there.

After Mother's we went to Hi-Time Wine Cellars and I was blown away. The store was immense and they had more kinds of wine and liquor (and a pretty decent selection of beer) than I knew existed. The cellar was a labyrinth that wound its way beneath the store with thousands and thousands of individual selections ranging from $6 to over $600 per bottle. I can't imagine trying to shop there unless you really knew what you were looking for, but it was truly one of a kind and well worth seeing. These first four stores were all within five blocks of each other.

The tour ended at Bristol Farms in Newport Beach where Tony McAndrews, one of our classmates from Bristol, led us through the store. The store manager is actually Bill Veeder, the other one of our Bristol classmates, so they knew we were coming and treated us very well - grilling up some of their 21 day aged New York steaks for us to sample. Bristol Farms reminded me a lot of Haggen, but is about half the size of one of our stores and focuses a bit more exclusively on the upscale customer. They only build their stores where there's an average household income of over $100,000.

The tour ended just before 3pm and, in order to avoid the traffic back to Marina Del Rey, ten of us decided to go next door to Gulf Stream and have dinner before heading back. We had a good time and probably saved ourselves two and half hours of sitting on the freeway.