SMORGASBORD : Tale of 2 Stores : The merchandise may differ between supermarkets, but the managers shelve any talk of their strategy.

The clean-cut young man identified himself as an assistant manager at the Vons supermarket on Ventura’s westside. Even though he was wearing one of those white and red name tag badges, his name is still a mystery to me. As soon as I identified myself as a food writer, he immediately clasped both hands to his chest so that I couldn’t read his name tag.

After all, I’d wanted to ask him some pretty incriminating questions, the answers to which he seemed to think could get him into lots of trouble with the boss.

The questions were really tricky and clearly involved trade secrets, even national security. Such as: Does Vons tailor its merchandising to meet the needs of each neighborhood? And if so, how?

This particular store was in the Mission Plaza shopping center, in an industrial area of Ventura where many Latinos live and shop. Vons is a major food merchandiser in the county--maybe THE major food merchandiser--with nearly a dozen stores. I could tell you the exact number, except that District Manager Brad Melvin, headquartered in Ventura, didn’t return my phone calls.

I mean, these were dangerous questions that I wanted to ask these people. I wanted to know if they carry six-pound cans of menudo--the popular Mexican beef and hominy stew--at Mission Plaza and in the eastside store at Telephone Road and Victoria Avenue, which is in a more affluent and predominately Anglo area of town. What about 25-pound sacks of flour?

By checking myself I learned that menudo is at both stores, but the flour is stocked only in the westside store.

A giant box of Arm and Hammer laundry soap, which boasts 85 loads of wash, is also sold at both outlets, but I didn’t notice any corn masa (used for tortillas and tamales) at the eastside Telephone Road site. There’s lots of it at the westside store. And the selection of dried chili peppers occupies a lot more space at the Mission Plaza store than it does on the eastside.

The variety and amount of beans displayed are pretty much the same at each location, but on the westside there’s a difference in labeling. You find the beans here labeled in both English and Spanish, with red beans also passing as “Frijoles Rojos.”

Besides the simple ice creams such as Jerseymaid and Dreyers, both branches boast the more expensive types, such as Ben & Jerry’s and Haagen-Dazs. Both also carry many gourmet items, among them Pepperidge Farm cookies and Pellegrino and Perrier waters, which apparently cross both economic and ethnic lines. Other somewhat exotic products, such as virgin imported olive oil and walnut and avocado oils, are in both stores.

In the produce and bakery areas, there are some significant differences.

The “hot” bakery, which Vons boasts in most of its outlets, is present in both the eastside and westside stores, but the merchandising is a bit different.

Many of the freshly baked French rolls and varieties of bagels are in separate bins at Mission Plaza, so that they can be bought individually. Not so on the eastside.

The eastside boasts a luscious selection of gourmet fruits and vegetables that are missing entirely at Mission Plaza--items such as baby cauliflower, oyster mushrooms, blood oranges, radicchio, kiwano melons and Asian pears. There’s a much larger display of 10-pound bags of potatoes on the westside, and also five types of tortillas. The eastside gets only three types.

Pricing seems to be the same at all Von’s stores in the area due, I imagine, to the requirements of mass-media advertising.

I didn’t dare walk the stores with a yardstick--which is what I really wanted to do--to figure out exactly how much footage each store devotes to categories such as jug wines or fresh seafood.

If I had, I don’t know what Cuppy Gonzales would have done when he found me. Gonzales is the Mission Plaza store manager. He found me just after I’d been stonewalled by his assistant. I was walking down the aisles of his store taking notes.

When I explained that I wasn’t doing a hit job on Vons but just trying to figure out whether an organization as large as Vons can market to the local demands of differing neighborhoods, he relaxed a bit. But not much. Gonzales reiterated that Vons employees in the field are absolutely forbidden to discuss their merchandising with anyone remotely resembling a journalist. But he did give me District Manager Melvin’s phone number. A lot of good that did.

I might know that there’s a better selection of tortillas and peppers on the westside, and that I can buy goodies such as baby cauliflower only on Telephone Road. But I still don’t know the name of that assistant manager.