Max Kohl

Origins and early life

Max Kohl was born in Poland in 1901 and came to Milwaukee in the mid-1920s, where he worked in a Schlitz bottle-cap factory and saved enough to open a small grocery store.

Work and career

The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee describes him as a Polish Jewish immigrant, and his son Herb, the future senator, recalled being brought up in a traditionally Jewish home. His first shop opened in 1927 at Lincoln and Kinnickinnic avenues, in the Bay View neighbourhood, and he added three more during the years of the Depression. In 1946 he opened his first supermarket, in Sherman Park, with an in-store bakery and delicatessen, and by 1969 Kohl's Food Stores was the largest independently owned food chain in Wisconsin.

In 1962 he opened his first department store, alongside one of his supermarkets, and placed it between the high-end department stores and the discounters. He ran the business with his sons, built the Northridge and Southridge shopping malls with them from 1967, and by 1972 the family owned fifty-six supermarkets, six department stores, three drugstores and three liquor stores. That year the Kohls sold a controlling interest to a subsidiary of British American Tobacco and Max retired, while his son Herb stayed on as president until the family left the company in 1979.

Personal life

He served on the boards of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, the Milwaukee Jewish Home and the Beth El Ner Tamid synagogue, and he told his children that money is like manure, no good unless you spread it around. He died in December 1981, at eighty, and the department stores that carry his name went on, under other owners, to reach from coast to coast.