Store Whets Russian Appetites -- Tacoma Firm Helps Introduce Grocery Shopping American Style

MOSCOW - Supervalu International of Tacoma has brought a little American convenience to the world's most inconvenient society.

The international division of the nation's biggest food-distribution company, Supervalu Inc., has teamed up with a Russian company to open a small supermarket just 40 minutes from the Kremlin.

The store, Lux, is stocked with a wide array of what most Americans take for granted in their fast-paced lives: everything from Pop Tarts, Kool-Aid and Spaghetti-O's to Stove Top Stuffing and Betty Crocker SuperMoist Pudding-in-the-Mix Devil's Food Cake Mix.

"It's beautiful," sighs Alla Kirsonova, 50, an engineer, looking at a shelf of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese dinners. "The packages are so colorful and attractive. They must have wonderful things inside."

The store astounds Russians, who live in a world where convenience is largely not for sale. Ordinarily, after hours of shopping, they spend hours cooking.

Lux is stocked from the land of more money than time. It has shopping carts with infant seats and wide aisles and bright lights, pleasant clerks in nicely cut uniforms, checkout counters with registers that scan bar codes.

Even though you have to climb three flights of stairs to get to the store from the parking lot, there's convenience with a capital "C": A Lux clerk pushes your grocery cart outside and then lifts it up - groceries, cart and all - and carries it down the steps to your car.

It's clean, it's comfortable and it raises questions such as this: Can a nation that loves the can opener and microwave oven overwhelm a people sustained by the chopping board and stew pot?

Charles Witzleben thinks so. The president of Supervalu International says Lux officials had more knowledge and eagerness to finance the venture than Supervalu had expected. But the challenges of setting up the supermarket operation were enormous.

For a $600,000 fee from Lux, Supervalu ordered and set up equipment such as shopping carts, hand baskets, merchandising display racks and bar code readers for the 13,600-square-foot store. (The average U.S. supermarket has about 30,000 to 40,000 square feet.) All of it had to be shipped to Russia.

Lux's retail experience was in running clothing shops in Moscow; it had to be taught nearly everything about operating an American-style supermarket, Witzleben says. Supervalu is not a partner in Lux but continues to provide advice.

Much of the merchandise in Lux is not affordable for most Russians, who must pay in hard currency. The mark-up in Russia is usually at least 100 percent, because of the short supplies of Western goods, Witzleben says.

Kirsonova, for instance, earns 10,000 rubles a month - about $22.50. So she is reluctant to spend $8.20 on a box of Cheerios. She was there to admire rather than shop.

"It's a pity to spend money on food," she says. "If I had money I would spend it on clothes or some nice pots and pans."

Will Russians, who spend long fall days out in the countryside lovingly picking mushrooms in an important seasonal ritual, ever agree to buy canned mushroom gravy?

Should Count Chocula take the place of the morning bowl of kasha, a bland but rib-sticking porridge?

What role can Jiffy Blueberry Muffin Mix (with imitation blueberries) assume in a society where berry picking is the national pastime?

Will a people who consider heavy doses of sour cream the best possible nutrition load their carts with Equal and Ultra Slim Fast?

And finally, what effect will the introduction of the Flav-o-rite label have on the spelling of English?

For now, anyway, foreigners are Lux's main customers. Children plead with their parents, "If I'm good today, will you take me to Lux?"

Parents call each other with up-to-the-minute reports. "The ship has come in," they say. "There's cranberry juice at Lux."

So far, says Lyubova Deineko, Lux's manager, about 90 percent of the customers are foreigners. Russians are buying only scarce over-the-counter medicines and toiletries - even though a 6-ounce tube of Crest toothpaste costs $5.55, twice what it costs in the United States.

Supervalu International, which exports grocery items to customers in the Pacific Rim, the Caribbean and Europe, supplies Lux with its canned and boxed goods. The products are shipped in a container from Savannah, Ga., to Germany and on to Finland, then trucked to Moscow.

Supervalu is hoping to learn how to get into the Russian market in the long term. Here, after all, is a country of 150 million people without a single supermarket chain.

Items at Lux have been selling swiftly. "We were surprised at how quickly mops and brooms and condoms sold," Witzleben says.

-- Times South bureau reporter John Stevens contributed to this report.