Bye,Bye,WEO

The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. has had a hard time living up to its name lately. Having closed down unprofitable operations on the West Coast, the U.S.'s largest food chain (3,500 stores) now reaches no closer to the Pacific than Kansas City. There has been nothing great, moreover, about A. & P.'s financial performance. Saddled with too many small or poorly located stores, the company in 1972 gambled on a discount-pricing program known as WEO (for Where Economy Originates) to win more customers, and ended up with a $51 million loss that fiscal year. Earnings have been in the black since then, but sales growth has been slow. Safeway Stores, with only two-thirds as many outlets as A. & P., last year supplanted it as the biggest-selling grocer.

Many of A. & P.'s problems have been attributed to the overconservatism of an inbred management; top officers have always come up through the A. &P. ranks. But this week a youthful outsider takes over as A. & P.'s chairman. He is Jonathan Scott, 44, an informal Idaho-born six-footer who until last month was head of Albertson's, Inc., a Boise-based supermarket chain.

Scott joined Albertson's as a trainee in 1953 after marrying the boss's daughter, and rose to executive vice president six years later; he proved so able that even after his marriage broke up, his ex-father-in-law made him vice chairman and chief executive officer. Scott wants to improve A. & P.'s "slipping image" among shoppers, partly by building many new stores. He will probably ditch the WEO slogan, which he does not like, but still keep markups low. Yet he also hopes to lift A. &P.'s profit margin, which now hovers at less than half its traditional level of 1-c- on every dollar. Scott reckons that earnings should start to improve within a year. Just to play safe, however, he asked for--and got-- a five-year contract.

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