BUSINESSWorld

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Jul 5, 1996

Cash and cough drops

SAN FRANCISCO (NYT) -- Wells Fargo & Co. will join with the largest drugstore chain in the West -- Thrifty PayLess Inc. -- to put drugstores in as many as 50 banks. California's second-largest bank and Thrifty are joining ranks in the name of providing greater one- stop shopping convenience to their customers.

To test whether bank customers want prescription drugs, film developing or greeting cards, Thrifty will lease the majority of space -- 3,000 to 10,000 square feet -- in five Wells Fargo branches in northern and southern California at market rates. These will be remodeled in the fall and open for dual business in early 1997.

San Francisco-based Wells Fargo declined to disclose the locations of the branches to be converted until all the building permits are approved -- in about 45 to 60 days. If the pilot project goes well, Wells Fargo plans to become roommates with Thrifty in 50 or more of its 2,110 branches in 12 states. And that could be just the beginning. Although Wells Fargo will not invite other drugstore chains to share its space, it is considering similar agreements with other leading retailers.

"We're looking at businesses which customers visit two, three or four times a month," said Jim Ketchum, Wells Fargo's executive vice president for strategic planning. "We want to make it more convenient to buy a magazine, pick up milk, fill a prescription and pick up cash on the same trip."

Bringing retailers to the bank is a new twist on Wells Fargo's strategy of taking itself where its customers need to go. Since 1990, it has opened 515 supermarket branches and operates kiosks or minibranches in eight of the state's top 10 supermarket chains.

Family radio

ATLANTA (Cox) -- If you remember the height of the CB radio craze, you can understand the excitement over at Radio Shack now that its petition before the Federal Communications Commission for the creation of a two-way radio category called the Family Radio Service has been approved.

During the late `70s, it seemed that almost everyone wanted a CB radio. And Radio Shack profited from that. The company hopes to capture that same kind of excitement and sales by selling radios for the newly authorized frequencies. The petition, filed with the FCC in July 1994, assigns frequencies to small FM walkie-talkie type radios that can be used without a license. The radios are designed to have a range of about a half-mile. Radio Shack, which will begin selling these radios in early 1997, hopes they'll be used by families to stay in touch in the neighborhood or while in shopping malls. Parents also could use one of the radios as a mobile monitor that could constantly transmit the goings-on around a child on a playground or in the yard. The palm-size radios will be smaller than a CB walkie-talkie and will operate in the UHF band of frequencies.

The cost of the radios probably will range from $100 to $200, according to Radio Shack. In many cases, as long as the radios are in range, they can be used instead of a pager or a cellular phone with no air-time fees. Radio Shack plans to sell the units in all 6,800 of its stores.

Pounding the pavement

NEW YORK (AP) -- Many corporate executives are looking for new positions because they're dissatisfied with their jobs, finds a survey by executive recruiter Paul Ray Berndtson and Cornell University. The survey of nearly 1,900 executives found nearly 30 percent plan to leave their jobs as soon as they find something else. Sixty-nine percent have already sent resumes to prospective employers during the past year. Many of the survey respondents cited job insecurity and-or heavy workloads as the reason for their unhappiness.

Merlin to appear

ATLANTA (Cox) -- Fans of IBM's OS/2 got their noses out of joint because of all the publicity and excitement generated when Microsoft released Windows 95. Both OS/2 and Windows 95 are operating systems for personal computers. Microsoft's Windows has the lion's share of the market and then a little bit more. But some computer experts believe that OS/2 is more stable. But since Windows is more widely used and known, it gets all the attention.

That'll become obvious again later this year when IBM releases its new version of OS/2. Don't expect much fanfare, but the software, code-named Merlin, has some fancy features that aren't found in Windows. For instance, users will be able to use what IBM calls "VoiceType" to literally dictate messages and control many functions just by speaking into a microphone.

The appearance of OS/2 will be very similar to Windows 95. And, like Windows 95, it will have built-in support for the Internet. But OS/2 goes one additional step and will include built-in support for a new World Wide Web technology called Java. Java furnishes the ability to use small programs directly from the Web, rather than from the computer.

Merlin will require at least an IBM-compatible PC running at 33 megahertz with 16 megabytes of RAM and 200 megabytes of hard disk space. No release date has been set yet.