Robert Price
Robert Price · Economics & Business
Co-founder with his father Sol Price of The Price Company (Price Club, 1976), its chief executive until the 1993 merger with Costco, and co-founder (1996) and long-time chairman of PriceSmart, the warehouse-club operator of Central America and the Caribbean
San Diego, California, United States
San Diego
Robert Price is recognized among Jewish contributors to Economics & Business — Co-founder with his father Sol Price of The Price Company (Price Club, 1976), its chief executive until the 1993 merger with Costco, and co-founder (1996) and long-time chairman of PriceSmart, the warehouse-club operator of Central America and the Caribbean
Origins and early life
Robert Price was born in San Diego, California, one of the two sons of the retailer Sol Price and of Helen Moskowitz, and went to San Diego High School before graduating from Pomona College.
Work and career
His grandparents on his father's side, Samuel Price and Bella Barkin, were Russian Jewish immigrants from a small town near Minsk, and his father worked as a lawyer for the Jewish charities of San Diego. He began his career in 1965 at FedMart, the discount membership store his father had opened in a San Diego warehouse in 1954 for federal employees and their families. After his father was dismissed from FedMart in 1975, they founded The Price Company together, and in July 1976 they opened the first Price Club on Morena Boulevard in San Diego, a membership warehouse that sold goods in bulk at a discount.
Robert Price was its chief executive from 1976 until its merger with Costco in 1993, by which time the clubs had spread across North America, and he then chaired the merged Price/Costco from October 1993 to December 1994. In 1996 he and his father founded PriceSmart to take the warehouse club to Central America and the Caribbean, and he has chaired its board since its spin-off from Price Enterprises in 1997. He also led PriceSmart as chief executive from 2006 to 2010 and again on an interim basis from 2023 to 2025; by August 2025 the company operated 56 clubs in thirteen countries and territories.
As president of the Price Family Charitable Fund he announced in 2011 a $50-million gift to the University of Southern California, which renamed its public policy school after his father and created the USC Sol Price Center for Social Innovation. He chairs Price Philanthropies, the family foundation that supports charitable work in the countries where PriceSmart operates, and in 2010 he published an account of his father's FedMart years in The Journal of San Diego History.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: PriceSmart, Form 10-K (2025) and proxy statement (2025); The Journal of San Diego History (Fall 2010), Robert E. Price, « Sol Price: Retail Revolutionary »
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Co-founder with his father Sol Price of The Price Company (Price Club, 1976), its chief executive until the 1993 merger with Costco, and co-founder (1996) and long-time chairman of PriceSmart, the warehouse-club operator of Central America and the Caribbean
Source: PriceSmart, Form 10-K (2025) and proxy statement (2025); The Journal of San Diego History (Fall 2010), Robert E. Price, « Sol Price: Retail Revolutionary »
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