Supermarket

The O&O supermarket in Darby, a 17-month-old experiment in employee ownership, has closed its doors and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Darby store is the second in the O&O chain, so named because the employees owned and operated it, to fail in the last year. Four O&Os remain open. "They made a really strong effort to try to make a go of it there (in Darby). . . . They just weren't making enough money to stay in business," said Andrew Lamas, managing director of the nonprofit Philadelphia Association for Cooperative Enterprise (PACE)

The beleaguered Strawberry Mansion supermarket will have a new operator, with a store full of goods, come July. Harold Friedland, operator of several Thriftway supermarkets and a member of the family that owned the defunct Food Fair grocery chain, signed a lease this week to take over the neighborhood market. The employee-owned Strawberry Mansion O&O supermarket, which filed for bankruptcy protection in March, has been operating with virtually bare shelves and few workers since late last year, after accumulating $1.5 million in debt.

Bristol Township officials will try to persuade the owners of the Acme store in Croydon to reconsider plans to close the village's only supermarket. Acme reportedly wants to transfer its Northeast Philadelphia engineering center at Mascher Street and Allegheny Avenue to the site. Township officials said the Acme was scheduled to close Saturday. Peter Shaplin, an Acme official at company offices in Malvern, confirmed yesterday that the store was due to close but said he could not comment further.

The supermarket tabloids have dreamed of a story like this. And now that it is upon them, they may hug themselves to death. If you listen carefully, you can hear their adrenaline washing and sloshing as they brace themselves for yet another off-the-wall revelation. Of course, we're talking about the national health-care story, which, as you know, is mother's milk to the supermarket tabs. Well, you can never tell: Health care could leap into tabloid headlines: GENNIFER FLOWERS AND PAULA JONES OPERATE ON BILL CLINTON AND THEN NURSE HIM BACK TO HEALTH IN THE BACK ROOM OF A BAR NEAR THE ARKANSAS-TEXAS BORDER - THE ONLY TWO AMERICANS DARING ENOUGH TO RISK CONTRACTING THE MYSTERY DISEASE THAT FELLED THE PRESIDENT AND REQUIRED THE AMPUTATION OF THREE TOES BY LANTERN LIGHT.

Albert Lerner, 96, of Center City, a door-to-door salesman who became a supermarket chain vice president, died of complications from an infection Friday at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. In the 1950s, Mr. Lerner worked two jobs, his son Alan said. During the week, he sold insurance for Metropolitan Life, and on weekends, he sold socks and hosiery at the Quakertown Farmers & Flea Market. By 1960, Mr. Lerner was managing the Quakertown market, as well as markets in Bristol and Woodbury.

One of every three dollars spent in Philadelphia-area supermarkets goes to Acme Markets, the leader in the annual ranking of supermarket chains released yesterday. The chain, a unit of American Stores Corp. of Salt Lake City, is expected to have $2.33 billion in sales this year at its 147 stores in the area. The rankings were prepared by Food Trade News, a trade newspaper that examined how the roughly $7 billion a year in supermarket sales in this area are divvied up. According to the survey, the 10 largest chains will capture 82.9 percent of food sales this year in a 15-county area that stretches from Philadelphia's western suburbs through South Jersey and northern Delaware.

Four bandits armed with shotguns robbed a busy supermarket in West Mount Airy last night, police said. The robbers roughed up five people with their weapons during the eight- minute holdup, according to police. Paul Moran, the manager of the store, at 7010 Germantown Ave., called police at 10:09 p.m. while the robbery was in progress, police said. The unmasked gunmen, each toting a shotgun, were described by witnesses as being in their late 20s. They entered the crowded store, methodically robbed the cashiers, then fled in a black sedan, either an Oldsmobile or a Plymouth, witnesses told police.

Call me overly fussy, but I'm a tad turned off whenever a supermarket checkout clerk goes into a coughing fit while scanning my groceries. Even if the food is wrapped, I feel uncomfortable putting it in the pantry or refrigerator knowing its packaging was exposed to pathogens. I imagine there are others equally squeamish. True, this may be an unrealistic attitude. Germs, after all, are everywhere, especially where people congregate. Maybe that's why some stores offer antiseptic wipes for customers to use on shopping-cart handles.

Sometimes, big disputes flare up over very small things. As small, for example, as the labels affixed to packages in the supermarket. There is plenty of controversy right now over whether to bring back the price tag, a vanishing species in the bar-coded, computerized supermarket of the 1980s. Consumer advocates have grown nostalgic for the price tag, the old- fashioned kind made of gummy paper or stamped in ink. They say it is essential that individual supermarket items be priced so that shoppers are protected from error-prone scanners.

The mega-supermarket boom is continuing through Bucks with a recent announcement heralding the arrival of a new player in the battle for a share of the marketplace. Giant Food Inc. of Landover, Md., has announced that it will enter the Bucks County foray with its first two markets in the state, set for Lower Makefield and Hilltown Townships. Based on annual sales that totaled $3.5 billion last year, it is the 12th-largest supermarket chain in the nation. The 65,000-square-foot Lower Makefield store, planned as part of Oxford Oaks, a shopping center set for Oxford Valley and Big Oak Roads, will set up a battle of the "Giants" in the township.