The Price Is Right, and So Are the Profits

I am at a San Diego shrine. The air is heady with devotion. Believers have come here seeking absolution (and a chance to pay wholesale).

I am at the Price Club on Market Street.

Shoppers are returning cases of Diet Coke and stocking up on jumbo-size bags of potato chips, boxes of birdseed and maybe a lawn mower or three.

Forbes Magazine has just listed the Price Co. as the third most profitable American company of the 1980s.

Only the Liz Claiborne clothing firm of New York and Rollins Inc., the Atlanta-based pest control and burglar alarm chain, are ranked higher. According to Forbes, Price Club has had a 40.5% return on equity over the decade, 24.3% in the past 12 months.

It started in 1976 with a single store (called a “location” in Pricespeak) in San Diego’s Rose Canyon. Now there are 47 in the United States (including Santee, San Marcos and Chula Vista) and six in Canada.

If you had invested $1,000 in Pricestock in the late 1970s, you’d be reading this in your villa on the Cote d’Azur.

“Good members, good locations, good merchandise at good prices,” said Brent Knudsen, vice president for marketing. Pricepeople talk like that.

I have gone out to the Southeast San Diego Price Club to search for the secret. I am turned back at the door.

Inside the barn-like warehouse, the weed trimmers and toilet paper and 50-pound bags of pre-popped popcorn are piled to the ceiling. I can peek but not enter. Members only.

I am not annoyed. You don’t go to Lourdes and ask for a gallon to go.

“The Price Club gives you everything you need, and everything you never knew you needed until you saw it,” explains Muriel King, 38, who lives in Spring Valley. “I always buy more than I intended, but I never feel guilty.”

There you have it: guilt-free consumerism. Now go forth and be profitable.

Snore Closeout

Try one of these.

- My favorite Christmas press release comes from San Diego ear, nose and threat specialist Dr. Pierre Rivet.

It begins: “Laugh and the world laughs with you; snore and you sleep alone.” He’s selling a new surgery called palatopharyngoplasty.

- Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s State of the City address is set for 6 p.m. Jan. 8.

The three previous addresses have been at Golden Hall, the Old Globe Theatre and the Ruben H. Fleet Space Theatre. This year: the seat of government, the City Council chambers on the 12th floor of City Hall.

There is said to be symbolism that will become apparent.

- Nothing classes up an editor’s note like a famous quote. Here’s one from this month’s edition of the Forum, the newspaper of the San Diego-based Mexican and American Foundation:

“It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.”

It’s attributed to Doug Hammarskjold, former secretary-general of the United Nations.

Rent-a-Cop Kolender

The actions of former San Diego Police Chief Bill Kolender have become a mini-issue in the bitter standoff between Newspaper Guild members and the Union-Tribune.

As the midnight strike deadline approached Friday, Kolender, now a high-level assistant to the U-T publisher, positioned himself at the turnstile that employees use to leave the building.

Kolender checked to see if anyone was carting off company property.

Among other things, he seized a Rolodex from Union reporter Joe Gandelman.

Gandelman says he told Kolender that the Rolodex had been privately purchased. Kolender told a television reporter that he thought Gandelman said the Rolodex belonged to the company.

At a rally Tuesday, Guild President Ed Jahn accused Kolender of “behaving like a K mart security guard.”

Two editors called Gandelman to tell him that the Rolodex will be returned immediately and that he can do with it as he wishes.