Chain puts lots of stock in new grocery outlet.

Byline: Joe Mosley The Register-Guard

SPRINGFIELD - Frill-free grocery shopping gets a new face with today's opening of the area's first outlet of Save-A-Lot - a national "edited assortment" chain that focuses on the high points of its customers' grocery lists.

"Even though we're limited assortment, we still provide a pretty wide range of products," company spokeswoman Jaime Folsom said Wednesday while offering a sneak peak of the store at 42nd and Main streets, which will open at 8 a.m. today.

She offered the produce department as an example. Located just inside the store's front door, it offers items such as tomatillos, mangoes and papayas along with the more basic Roma tomatoes and russet potatoes.

The produce area is smaller than in most conventional stores, but stocked with a variety of fruits and vegetables displayed, for the most part, in opened shipping boxes - one of the chain's many cost-cutting practices.

The 1,150-store chain buys in bulk - 60 million cans of corn per year, for example - and takes advantage of its small stores, minimal staffing and an efficient distribution system to keep costs down, company officials said. The Springfield store will operate with 15 to 20 employees.

"We can go to locations that a 40,000-square-foot store cannot," said Folsom, in town from the company's headquarters in Earth City, Missouri, for the opening of the Springfield store.

Save-A-Lot - the nation's fifth-largest grocery chain - expanded into the Northwest last fall, opening two Portland-area stores and Washington outlets in Tacoma and Pasco. Another store opened in Vancouver, Wash., last week, and company officials foresee another 20 Northwest locations over the next two years.

"We want (each location) to be right for us, so sometimes that takes several months to research and find those right areas," Folsom said.

With its limited-inventory format, the Save-A-Lot chain attempts to pack the punch of a 40,000-square-foot supermarket into stores that are 14,000 to 16,000 square feet by skipping some of the peripheral goods and focusing on the highest-demand products.

No pharmacy, no floral, no coffee bar. Instead, there's what Folsom calls a "mini-dollar store" on an aisle of general merchandise all priced at $1 (such as a variety of kitchen implements) or in low-range increments of a dollar (such as a portable CD player for $8).

And there's a store full of house-brand items that carry with them a bit of behind-the-scenes whimsy - many of the company's labels are named after longtime employees.

Wescott brand cooking oil, for instance, is named after Marg Wescott, office services manager at the corporate offices in Missouri. McDaniel's Coffee is the namesake of David McDaniel, the chain's vice president of grocery procurement. And in the frozen foods section, Dianora's Pizza borrowed its name from Bob Dianora, the vice president of retail operations.

The new store at 4223 Main St., operated for the past several years as the Main Street Marketplace. It was previously an outlet of Price Chopper - predecessor of the locally-owned Market of Choice chain - until the building was sold in 2000 to R.B. Bruns, Inc. Save-A-Lot is leasing the store from Bruns, but renovated it and brought in all new fixtures.