Loose Lips Sink Chips

Few companies are as tight-lipped as Intel when it comes to introducing new products. The Santa Clara chip maker is known to impose gag orders on customers to keep them quiet.

But last Monday’s unveiling of Intel’s 486SX “computer on a chip” didn’t go so smoothly. A one-month delay in the announcement sent more than 20 personal computer makers scrambling to pull trade publication ads promoting computers that use the new chip.

But one ad slipped through, from Acer America, touting a new line of 486SX computers in PC World magazine a full week before Intel’s announcement.

An Acer spokesman called the ad “kind of embarrassing.” An Intel spokeswoman called it a “logistical” error.

Hole-Sale impact

One of the lesser publicized economic effects caused by the end of the Persian Gulf War is told by Westco, a Pico Rivera bakery supply firm that provides doughnut mix to the owner of a 21-store House of Donuts chain in Saudi Arabia.

Westco founder Allen Ziegler says the company was selling up to 120,000 pounds of mix a month to meet the demand from troops in Saudi Arabia.

Ziegler said that’s enough for about 3 million doughnuts and about three times the amount Westco normally ships there. Unfortunately, he notes, “it’s started to go down since the end of the war.”

Unhappy Earth Day

The Earth Day celebration was bittersweet last week at Earth Store, a San Rafael shop selling environmentally friendly products such as nontoxic cleaning products and recycled paper goods. Owners Richard and Linda Greene announced that they will close the store, which only opened last July, because business is slow.

One thing Green said he won’t miss is the annoying “nit-picking” he suffered at the hands of hard-core environmentalists.

Greene complains that he was criticized for selling South Korean-made stuffed animals--the proceeds of which went to benefit a wildlife fund--because environmentalists are often at odds with the Korean government. Some even scolded him because Ben & Jerry’s Rain Forest Crunch bars he sold came wrapped in plastic.

“Here we were trying to please people,” Greene lamented. “It’s almost like you can’t win.”

Briefly. . .

Buyout king Henry Kravis, whose Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. bought the “Daily Racing Form” last week from Rupert Murdoch, spent much of his freshman year at Claremont Men’s College playing the horses at Santa Anita, according to the book “Barbarians at the Gate” . . . Charles T. Condy, founder of the fledging San Francisco geothermal firm California Energy Co., resigned as chairman last week, but arranged to buy his Bently company car from the firm.