BIZWATCH

By BERNARD BAUMOHL; WENDY COLE; JOHN GREENWALD; S.C. GWYNNE; MICHAEL KRANTZ

HIGH-CALIBER HELP FOR BEN & JERRY'S

Forget Cherry Garcia, Chunky Monkey and Rainforest Crunch. The next hot new flavor at Ben & Jerry's Homemade could be called Lock-'n'-Load Rocky Road. The quirky maker of superpremium ice cream began the new year by scooping up gun-industry executive Perry Odak to fill a two-month vacancy as its new CEO. Odak most recently was chief operating officer of U.S. Repeating Arms Co., the maker of Winchester rifles, and he brings 25 years of consumer-marketing savvy to Ben & Jerry's (est. 1996 sales: $175 million), which could sorely use some executive firepower.

Despite a cult following, Ben & Jerry's ice-cream business has been flat in the fat-free 1990s. Odak will take out a salary of $300,000 a year to dream up new products and turn the management team into what he calls "a well-oiled machine." It remains to be seen how well his approach will meld with a company whose Peace Pops bars help support causes like gun control. But investors foresaw more bang for their bucks: Ben & Jerry's stock closed at $12.75 a share on Friday, up $1.38 for the week.

THE PERILS OF HAVING WAY MORE THAN ENOUGH

The idea behind the chain of stores known as Incredible Universe was simple: bigger is better, and much bigger is much better. In the past four years, these "gigastores" have sprouted up in the American exurban landscape, each boasting five football fields of retail space crammed with just about everything that could remotely be interpreted as "electronic."

Perhaps the managers at Tandy Corp., based in Fort Worth, Texas, should have heeded another aphorism: the bigger they come, the harder they fall. That describes roughly what happened last week when Tandy, which also owns Radio Shack and Computer City, acknowledged that Incredible Universe was really an incredible flop and pulled the plug on the entire 17-store operation. The closings, plus the stores' losses, totaled some $230 million and completely wiped out Tandy's profits for 1996. "Maybe," says retail analyst Lynn Detrick of Williams MacKay Jordan & Co. of Houston, "this does suggest that you can take it too far, that stores can be too big and inconvenient." What an incredible thought.

PLAY IT AGAIN, STARBUCKS

Find yourself tapping your toes to background tunes while you shop? Don't think retailers haven't noticed. Catering to customers' musical tastes, retailers from Au Bon Pain to Pottery Barn to Polo Ralph Lauren are putting out their own CDs and cassettes. Starbucks' Blending the Blues sold some 50,000 CDs in two months, and five classical recordings for Victoria's Secret have sold more than 1 million copies each. The big buyers are baby boomers turned off by music stores. Maybe Virgin and Tower ought to offer cafe lattes and lingerie.

SAY HELLO (FINALLY) TO DIGITAL VIDEO

Are you ready for the next Big Geek Thing? The star attraction of this week's Consumer Electronics Show, the annual Las Vegas-based Woodstock of high-tech hype, will surely be those long-promised, long-delayed digital video discs. The gleaming 5-in. CD look-alikes can carry up to 20 times more data than their cd-rom forebears and provide the most advanced audio and video experiences yet offered to humankind.

More than 20 hardware manufacturers plan to release the first generation of DVD players this spring (probable asking price: $500 to $1,000), and computer makers are scrambling to produce new PCs equipped to play DVD-ROMs. What's less clear is how quickly Hollywood studios will clamber aboard the DVD bandwagon and release their movies on the untested new format. DVD's raison d'etre, after all, is to send VHS tapes and laser discs, the studios' cash cows, the way of all eight-tracks. This week's blizzard of dvd-themed press releases at the Las Vegas show should help reveal how quickly the new kid on the block might become the latest digital-era blockbuster.

--BY BERNARD BAUMOHL, WENDY COLE, JOHN GREENWALD, S.C. GWYNNE AND MICHAEL KRANTZ