Colleen Wilemon wheeled her shopping cart through a no-frills canned food aisle, turned the corner past the 25-pound sacks of flour and headed toward the checkout stand.

"I come here as often as I go to the grocery store. It's much easier to get in and out," Wilemon said. "I love Smart & Final."

In a world of sprawling membership warehouse clubs and giant grocery superstores, Smart & Final is a food industry aberration - a retailer that prefers small over big.

By promoting convenience, Smart & Final and its compact 20,000- to 26,000-square-foot warehouse stores are wooing customers like Wilemon who don't want to contend with the long checkout lines and crowded parking lots at a Costco or a Sam's Club but do want the advantage of low warehouse prices.

Over the decades, this concept has worked for Smart & Final, one of California's oldest retailers.

In the second quarter, for example, earnings soared 40 percent from a year ago to $4.5 million - the 10th straight quarterly profit since Smart & Final began restructuring in early 1999. At the same time, company-wide sales rose to $464 million, up 4.6 percent from the same period last year. Sales for stores open at least a year increased 4 percent.

"We're doing very well," Ross E. Roeder, Smart & Final chief executive officer, said during a visit to one of the company's five Sacramento stores.

With 226 stores and 5,300 employees in seven states and Mexico, the non-membership warehouse outlet serves business customers such as caterers and restaurants as well as nonbusiness consumer. It also has food service distribution companies in Florida and Stockton.

Smart & Final stores are stocked high with large- and small-sized food items, including fresh meat, dairy and produce, janitorial supplies, party goods and professional-quality food and kitchen equipment ranging from commercial toasters to 65-quart stainless steel stockpots.

The stores carry both institutional and consumer size products. Shelves are stocked high with a variety of items including: 35-pound containers of vegetable shortening, gallon jars of mustard, 7-pound tins of baked beans and even gumball machine refills.

Shoppers can also pick up a box of Farmer John official Dodger hot dogs.

Retail experts and competitors alike find it hard to categorize the company. They say there's no other retailer like it.

"It's kind of a cross between a supermarket and a Costco or a Sam's," said Jonathan Zeigler, a retail analyst with Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown in San Francisco.

But unlike the warehouse clubs, Smart & Final doesn't have tire centers, pharmacies, hot dog stands, one-hour film developing centers, furniture aisles, electronics departments, toy sections, jewelry counters or clothing racks.

Smart & Final carries roughly 10,000 food items, about three to four times what the warehouse clubs stock. The company isn't a warehouse club wannabe, although it does want to pick off some of the dollars increasingly spent at those clubs.

Since 1991, the warehouse club industry has grown by an average of 9.7 percent a year vs. 5.6 percent annually for the retail industry overall, according to Warehouse Club Focus, a trade publication. Club industry sales are predicted to hit $69 billion this year and climb to $97 billion by 2004.

Smart & Final remains committed to its strategy of keeping its stores small - even the new ones - to ensure customers can come in and out quickly. That is a big selling point to consumers.

"I stop in (after work) and I'm still home by 5 o'clock," said Toula Karnezis of Sacramento.

"Going to Costco is like a planned event. It's an excursion," shopper Wilemon said. "It's very difficult to go in for one item."

Sacramento resident Vic Baker says the prices are comparable to the warehouse clubs. More important, "you can get smaller items." At the club stores, "you buy by the pallet," he said.

For time-strapped shoppers, "this is the place to shop," Roeder said.

Indeed, Smart & Final is no stranger to the grocery business. Established 130 years ago as Hellman-Haas Grocery, the company is one of the pioneers of the modern supermarket, introducing the "cash and carry" or self-service concept to the West Coast.

In 1915, the company was renamed after the new owners, J.S. Smart and H.D. Final.

By 1996, Smart & Final became the nation's largest non-membership warehouse grocer and started an aggressive expansion into Florida - a move that was poorly handled and put the company into the red.

Roeder, a longtime Smart & Final director and former chief of the Denny's restaurant chain, took over in 1999 and worked to turn around the struggling company.

"We took our eye off the ball in terms of the stores a little bit. They didn't have the in-depth knowledge of the market that they should have. Then they compounded the problem by expanding too quickly in Florida," Roeder said.

For example, the Mexican foods carried in the south Florida stores certainly didn't meet the tastes of the Cuban community.

In Florida, he revamped the store merchandise, launched a marketing campaign and overhauled a newly acquired food service business.

"We brought back a lot of focus and consistent direction to the stores. We put products in the stores that more closely matched the customer we were serving," Roeder said.

"In California, we improved our ethnic marketing. We've added a lot of new products. We redesigned the interior of our stores."

For now, Smart & Final is focused on expanding in its current markets rather than move into new territories. It is following a modest growth strategy calling for about a dozen new stores opening this year and 15 to 17 in 2002.

In the Sacramento region, Smart & Final operates five stores and captures only 1 percent of the local grocery market, according to Market Scope, a publication of Trade Dimensions of Wilton, Conn.

The company doesn't attract a lot of attention from the investment community. Although Smart & Final is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, its shares are closely held, with France's largest supermarket company, Groupe Casino, owning a 60 percent stake in Smart & Final. Trading is usually light, giving most securities analysts little reason to track the stock.

"People don't know about it. They're trying to get their name in front of everybody," Zeigler said.

This year, Smart & Final has launched a marketing blitz, urging consumers to save time and money and "shop like a pro."

"They're making good progress. They have really changed their store formats. They're trying to give it more of an appeal to grab more of the everyday retail customer," said Glenn Llopis, president of Power Insights Consulting, a Southern California warehouse club industry consultant. "There's still a way to go."

Power Insights Consulting is a Brea, CA based consultancy that specializes in warehouse club sales, marketing and organizational strategies for specialty food companies.