Sol Price

Origins and early life

Sol Price was born in the Bronx, in New York City, on 23 January 1916, the son of Samuel Price and Bella Barkin, Russian Jewish immigrants from a small town near Minsk.

Work and career

His father, ill with tuberculosis, moved to San Diego in 1928 and the family followed; Sol finished San Diego High School in 1931 at fifteen and took his bachelor's and law degrees at the University of Southern California in 1938. He married Helen Moskowitz that year, opened a law practice in San Diego and became, in his own words, a lawyer in the Jewish community for all the Jewish charities, among them the Hebrew Home for the Aged.

On 3 December 1954 he opened the first FedMart in a San Diego warehouse, a store for federal employees who paid two dollars for a lifetime membership and found a narrow choice of goods at low prices. FedMart opened to the general public in 1963 and kept adding stores until it was sold to German retailers in 1975, the year he was dismissed. In July 1976, with his son Robert, he opened the first Price Club on Morena Boulevard in San Diego, a membership warehouse selling goods in bulk at a discount; the chain had 94 clubs in North America by 1992 and merged with Costco in 1993.

Sam Walton wrote that he had borrowed as many ideas from Sol Price as from anybody else in the business, and in 1996 Price launched PriceSmart with Robert to take the warehouse club to Central America and the Caribbean. With Helen he set up the Price Family Charitable Fund in 1995, gave $2 million towards the student centre of the University of California, San Diego, and from 1994 invested millions in reviving City Heights, an inner-city neighbourhood of San Diego.

Later years

He died at his home in La Jolla on 14 December 2009, aged 93, and in 2011 a $50-million gift from the family fund renamed the public policy school of his alma mater the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy.