RETAIL TRADE: The Supermerchants

Even blasé New Yorkers gawked at the razzle-dazzle last week when Food Fair Stores Inc. opened two spick & span new supermarkets. Skywriting planes swept overhead. Models paraded by in hats adorned with lobsters and sirloin steaks. Mayor Impellitteri came to shop, Tex & Jinx McCrary put on a broadcast, and television’s Dagmar, surrounded by a crowd of 7,000, had her automobile license plates ripped off as souvenirs. Inside the air-conditioned stores, shoppers snatched at bargains (chicken at 39¢ a lb.), boggled at such curiosities as ostrich eggs at $45 apiece, llama steaks at $2.50 a lb.

All this whoopla was nothing new to George and Sam Friedland, the hard-selling brothers who run Food Fair Stores. They have pyramided a single small butcher shop into a chain of 131 big stores, the seventh biggest food chain in the U.S. Moreover, they have made it unique as the only major chain which consists of nothing but supermarkets. It is so efficient that it can usually meet the prices of such giants as A & P and Safeway, yet nets more out of every sales dollar (2.30¢) than any other chain in the big eight (A & P’s net: 1.15¢). Last year, on sales of $205 million, it netted $4,700,000.

Board Chairman Sam Friedland, now 54, and President George, 49, have been handling food since their boyhood, when they cut meat in their father’s kosher butcher shop in Bayonne, N.J. In 1921, they scraped up $1,000, and opened their own meat store in Harrisburg, Pa. In eleven years, they built a string of 25 small food shops in Pennsylvania.

When supermarkets blossomed in the early ’30s, the Friedlands were among the first to realize that they would permanently change the food business. They rented an old garage in Harrisburg, launched “The Giant Quality Food Price Cutter, bringing many carloads of the finest foods at ridiculously low prices.” Samples: eggs, 1¢ apiece; oranges, 7¢ a dozen. In the first week, the giant grossed $15,000, more than all their other Harrisburg stores combined.

Promptly, the Friedlands dumped all their small stores, plowed every dime into supers. In five years, they owned 22; sales soared to $13.5 million. Main secret of the Friedlands’ success is quick service to move goods fast. All new Food Fairs have low counters so that the housewife can quickly spot whatever she wants and move on. The Friedlands were fast to adopt prepackaged meat; their new stores have a conveyor-belt system for groceries at the checkout counter, and teams of five to count and package the orders. The Friedlands are moving just as fast as the customers. In the next year, they plan to build 19 new stores.