[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 206 (Thursday, December 21, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S19132-S19133]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ISRAEL ``IZZY'' COHEN

 Mr. SARBANES. Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute to a 
celebrated member of the Maryland business community, Mr. Israel 
``Izzy'' Cohen, who recently passed away at the age of 83. As the 
chairman of Giant Food, Inc. Izzy Cohen managed one of Maryland's and 
the Capital area's most successful corporations--and he accomplished 
this task with deep respect for his employees and a commitment to his 
community.
  Izzy Cohen's warm personality, devotion to customers and Giant 
employees is legendary. These were the talents that earned him the 
nomination of generations of employees and patrons. Under his 
leadership, Giant Foods pioneered in consumer information and 
involvement. His commitment to community was also reflected in his 
strong support of the educational television program, ``It's 
Academic,'' and in his many other fundraising activities. One notable 
example is Computers for Kids where customers save their Giant receipts 
and schools collect them for money for classroom computers and 
equipment. Thousands of children across the State of Maryland have 
benefited from Izzy Cohen's patronage of these programs.
  Izzy Cohen was truly an accomplished leader in commerce, and one of 
those outstanding citizens who by example and action evoked the very 
best in all of us. I extend my most sincere sympathies to all the 
family and friends of Izzy Cohen. Mr. President, I ask that the 
following articles from the Washington Post that pay tribute to Izzy 
Cohen be printed in the Record.
  The articles follow:

               [From the Washington Post, Nov. 24, 1995]

Israel Cohen, Chairman of Giant Food, Dies at 83 Cancer Cliams Pioneer 
                        In Supermarket Industry

                           (By Claudia Levy)

       Israel Cohen, the Giant Food Inc. chairman who built his 
     company into the largest regional grocery store chain in the 
     nation, died late Wednesday at his home in Washington at the 
     age of 83. He had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a form of cancer.
       A pioneer in an industry where razor-thin profit margins 
     quickly separate the winners from the losers, ``Izzy'' Cohen 
     was the principal architect in the rise of Giant from a 
     single store on Georgia Avenue to what many analysts say is 
     the premier regional supermarket chain in the nation.
       Washington area consumers today spend 44.8 cents of every 
     grocery dollar at Giant, largely because of Cohen's business 
     savvy.
       Cohen was one of the wealthiest people in the Washington 
     area and an important member of the local business community. 
     Yet he remained a very private person, talking little about 
     himself or his personal life, and worked in relative 
     obscurity.
       But ``as a retailer he had no fear,'' said business 
     consultant Sheldon ``Bud'' Fantle, former chairman of 
     People's Drug Stores Inc. ``All of his ideas were before the 
     fact. He was a leader.''
       Cohen commended a tight-knit organization that now includes 
     164 stores, largely in suburban neighborhoods, from New 
     Jersey to Northern Virginia. Its headquarters is in Landover 
     in Prince George's County, and 107 of its stores are in the 
     Washington area. Giant has more than 26,000 employees and 
     annual sales of $3.7 billion.
       The Giant real estate division, GFS Realty Inc., owns or 
     manages 27 shopping centers in the Washington area. Giant 
     also owns a bakery, a dairy, an ice cream plant, a soft-drink 
     plant, a plastic milk container manufacturing plant and other 
     food-processing businesses.
       Under Cohen, Giant advertised heavily in newspapers and was 
     quick to employ such marketing innovations as bulk sales, in-
     store pharmacies and products labeled with Giant's private 
     brand names. It hired former White House counselor Esther 
     Peterson as its first consumer adviser, promoted her heavily 
     and listened seriously to the customers. Giant was the first 
     chain in the country to install computer price scanners at 
     checkouts, now standard in the industry.
       ``This is the best businessman in Washington in his time,'' 
     said Donald E. Graham, chairman of The Washington Post Co. 
     and publisher of The Post. ``He built a great company in a 
     completely personal way. Everyone in Giant down to the 
     cashiers knew who they worked for and they knew it because 
     every week of his life he visited some Giant store. He 
     didn't just visit, he spent time,'' stopping to help 
     customers if needed.
       Cohen made it a point to promote from within, to the extent 
     of training company employees for sophisticated technical 
     jobs, Graham said. ``Every year, Giant relentlessly worked to 
     gain slivers of market shares,'' building it to the largest 
     in the country, Graham said.
       Fantle said Cohen ``was always two or three steps ahead of 
     his competition.'' Fantle's drug stores went head to head 
     with Giant's in-house pharmacies.
       For years Giant has had the highest profit margins among 
     Washington area supermarkets--3 percent in an industry where 
     the national average is 1 percent. Much of that margin came 
     from the profit of his drugstore operations and the fact that 
     Giant Food was a ``vertically integrated'' company that 
     manufactured everything from milk cartons to ice cream and 
     soda for its private brands.
       Cohen would say this was a result of having ``smart persons 
     to make decisions around here,'' Graham said, ``But everybody 
     else would give him the credit.''
       Fantle said ``He ran a bright, clean store with good 
     values. And certainly he had the knack of advertising. . . 
     .''
       When Cohen's longtime partners in Giant, members of the 
     Lehrman family, agreed to sell their share in the corporation 
     to a British supermarket chain in 1994, control of Giant 
     remained with Cohen, who owned half the voting stock and 
     controlled four of the seven seats on the board of directors.
       Giant announced yesterday that four senior officers and 
     Cohen's sister, Lillian Cohen Solomon, will now vote his 
     stock and manage Giant.
       Cohen had controlled the company since 1964, when his 
     father, company cofounder Nehemiah Meir ``N.M.'' Cohen, 
     retired. For a period, Washington attorney Joseph B. 
     Danzansky was chairman, a compromise choice resulting from a 
     dispute between Giant's founding families. But it was a 
     titular post, and Cohen ran the operation.
       Israel Cohen was born in Rishon-Le-Zion, Palestine, where 
     his father was a rabbi and teacher in a one-room school. The 
     Cohen family settled in Lancaster, Pa., when Israel Cohen was 
     9.
       N.M. Cohen at first operated a kosher butcher shop. In the 
     mid-1930s, he went into partnership in Washington with Samuel 
     Lehrman, a Harrisburg, Pa., food distributor, to begin a 
     self-service grocery store of the sort coming into vogue in 
     California.
       They selected Washington because they believed that federal 
     employees would form a reliable customer base. The first 
     store opened in the midst of a snowstorm on Feb. 6, 1936, on 
     Georgia Avenue at Park Road NW. Issy Cohen worked at the 
     store along with his brother, Manny, stocking shelves and 
     driving the company's truck.
       Izzy Cohen served in the Army during World War II and after 
     the war began to rise through administrative positions in the 
     Giant company, patterning his understated business style 
     after his father, who retired in 1964.
       Izzy Cohen took a year off in the 1950s to recover from 
     tuberculosis, which he had contracted in the Army, and used 
     the time to become a master bridge player. He was known to 
     fellow tournament players for his ``poker'' face, a card 
     player's best asset. He owned a condominium in Miami, where 
     he often went to play cards, and a stable of horses at Laurel 
     Race Course.
       Cohen set about expanding the Giant empire despite 
     increased competition, which in recent years has included 
     warehouse grocery firms and others. One key to its success, 
     Cohen told stockholders, was ``having our people fully 
     understand both the nature of what is a competitive war and 
     what their role is in the fight.''
       On his visits to stores, Cohen would pitch in to bag 
     groceries when the checkout lines were getting too long, 
     Giant President Pete L. Manos recalled yesterday. Cohen would 
     point out that the unshelled peanut bin needed a scoop or 
     that a sign was wrong, Manos said. He'd stop to talk to 
     customers 

[[Page S19133]]
     and would inspect the produce rooms and meat lockers for cleanliness, 
     Manos said.
       When it was known that he was going to visit a store, some 
     employees whose shifts were over ``would wait around to shake 
     his hand,'' Manos said.
       ``It goes back to the early days of the company,'' Manos 
     said. ``At Giant, we've always felt like we're a family, and 
     Izzy was the patriarch of the family. People looked forward 
     to seeing him.''
       In the stores, he greeted employees by their first names--
     all Giant workers wear name badges--and insisted on being 
     called Izzy. ``Mr. Cohen is my father's name,'' he used to 
     say, refusing to answer to it.
       Years ago, there was an executive dining room at Giant 
     headquarters, which Cohen closed because he wanted executives 
     to mingle with other employees, Manos said.
       Cohen had been estranged for many years from his wife, 
     Barbara, when she died in 1994. Their two children were not 
     involved in the business.
       Cohen avoided social functions, living a quiet life in his 
     parents' old house in the Forest Hills section of Northwest 
     Washington. He was close with his brother Manny, who died 
     several years ago, and his sister Lillian, who lives next 
     door. Together, they founded a charitable foundation and 
     named it for their father. Giant Food also operates a 
     charitable foundation.
       Izzy Cohen was chauffeured to work nearly every day in his 
     Cadillac. He would visit stores during the week and on 
     weekends. ``You have to have a place to go in the morning,'' 
     he told Washington Post Staff Writer Kara Swisher in 1994.
       Survivors include his children, Peter Cohen of Altamonte 
     Springs, Fla., and Dana Cohen Ellis of McLean; his sister and 
     two grandchildren.
                                                                    ____


               [From the Washington Post, Nov. 24, 1995]

Appreciation Izzy Cohen: Fierce Competitor, Instinctive Retailer, Eager 
                               Innovator

                  (By Frank Swoboda and Kara Swisher)

       Izzy Cohen's closest friends and toughest business 
     competitors say the same thing about him: He was a hell of a 
     grocer.
       Cohen, the chairman of Giant Food Inc. who died Wednesday 
     at the age of 83, didn't disagree. ``I might not be the best 
     corporate executive,'' Cohen once told his shareholders, 
     ``but I consider myself one of the best grocers in the 
     business.'' That's about as far as he went when it came to 
     public talk about his business philosophy and the strategies 
     he followed to build Giant from one store to 164, with 107 of 
     them in the Washington area where Giant dominates.
       Cohen never talked much about his personal life, either. 
     Though a multimillionaire, with estimates of his wealth 
     rising as high as $400 million, he led a relatively solitary 
     existence, living in the house in which he grew up, next door 
     to his sister, Lillian Cohen Solomon. He was a rare recluse 
     in a society that has come to lionize wealth and business 
     success.
       In many ways Cohen was the embodiment of a generation of 
     old-time Washington area entrepreneurs who treated their 
     employees like family and kept their personal lives low-key 
     and private.
       Even some Giant executives who worked for him for decades 
     knew little about his background. But those who knew him well 
     describe him as a sometimes gruff but generally uncomplicated 
     man, whose unwavering and single-minded devotion was the 
     business he inherited from his father.
       His ambition also came with a price, however, driving him 
     apart from his wife and children. Although he never divorced, 
     Cohen and his wife had been separated for nearly 40 years at 
     the time of her death two years ago.
       His sole passions outside of work were bridge and horse 
     racing. He was a master bridge player whose partners included 
     such luminaries of the game as good blood lines but none 
     particularly successful. His stable at Laurel racetrack, with 
     its gold chandeliers and air-conditioned stalls, was a model 
     for the racing industry.
       Longtime friend and racing companion David Finkelstein 
     tells of going to the track every weekend with Cohen. On the 
     way they would stop at the nearest Giant and buy sandwiches 
     and then take their brown bag lunch to their adjoining boxes. 
     Though Finkelstein also was in food distribution, Cohen never 
     talked business with him on the weekends.
       The two men also owned apartments at the Jockey Club in 
     Miami, where they would go to watch horse races in the cold 
     winter months. Cohen sometimes bought an entire row of seats 
     at the track so he wouldn't be crowded.
       On the few occasions when Cohen brought guests to the 
     track, Finkelstein said, he would place a bet on every horse 
     in every race for every guest. At the end of each race, he 
     would then be able to present his guests with a winning 
     ticket.
       But the real focus of Cohen's life was the grocery 
     business, where he was a fierce competitor and a constant 
     innovator who seized on computer scanning, in-store 
     pharmacies, private-label products, unit pricing, salad bars 
     and other advances to push Giant to the top of the area's 
     grocery business.
       Before Giant put pharmacies in its supermarkets, the 
     Washington market was dominated by three drugstore chains: 
     Drug Fair, Dart Drug and Peoples. Today, all three are gone 
     and Giant is the dominant player.
       Before there were automated teller machines, Izzy Cohen 
     tried putting bank branches in his stores. For a brief time 
     he even took Giant into the carwash, dry cleaning, rug and 
     pants cleaning businesses.
       ``Izzy was the most instinctive guy in terms of food 
     retailing,'' said Jeff Metzger, publisher of Food World, a 
     Columbia-based trade publication. ``He had an uncanny ability 
     to read the right signs, whether it meant putting a store in 
     the right place or adding on another cash register or 
     understanding that consumers came first.''
       Kenneth Herman, a longtime Cohen competitor whose family 
     started the Lanham-based Shoppers Food Warehouse Corp. chain, 
     agreed.
       ``He developed one of the finest grocery chains in the 
     country, because of his keen insights about a retail business 
     that is fast-changing,'' Herman said. ``He was truly a 
     merchant's merchant.''
       Izzy Cohen earned his MBA in the grocery business working 
     behind the counter, starting as a stock clerk and driver for 
     his father. In the years since, he worked in every department 
     at Giant except data processing.
       Tom McNutt, president of Local 400 of the United Food and 
     Commercial Workers union, which represents Giant employees, 
     tells of being called by Cohen and asked to come right over 
     to the Giant store in Landover, near McNutt's office and 
     Giant's headquarters. When McNutt got to the store, he found 
     Izzy in the produce department--arguing with a store manager 
     and a Giant executive over the proper placement of a display 
     sign. Cohen wanted McNutt's opinion.
       His decision to seek McNutt's opinion also underscored his 
     close relationships with the unions representing his 
     employees. Some critics have accused Giant of seeking 
     labor peace at any price, and Giant employees are among 
     the best paid in the industry.
       Over the years, Cohen gained a reputation as a fierce 
     competitor, once telling an interviewer that ``We consider 
     everyone a competitor, including 7 Eleven.'' Shoppers Food 
     Warehouse's Herman remembered Cohen as a ``very tough 
     competitor, but fair.''
       ``He was a tiger,'' Finkelstein said recalling how Giant 
     drove both Shop Rite and Kroger Co. out of the Washington 
     market in the early 1960s in a series of brutal price wars.
       Although he was a loner, Cohen did not try to hide from 
     either his employees or his customers. He ate regularly in 
     the company's cafeteria, which featured the same salad bar 
     and deli fare he offered his customers, and personally helped 
     customers during visits to Giant's stores.
       But Izzy Cohen's life was best summed up by his friend 
     Finkelstein who described him as ``a lonely, frustrated, 
     caring person'' and an ``unbelievable friend.''
                                                                    ____


               [From the Washington Post, Nov. 25, 1995]

                        Editorial--Israel Cohen

       Israel Cohen spent his life building a business that, more 
     than most, directly touches the lives of the people who live 
     in this region. He always spoke of himself as a grocer. As 
     chief strategist and chairman of Giant Food Inc., he was a 
     major force in the transformation of the grocery industry 
     over the past generation.
       Born in Palestine, Mr. Cohen came to this country as a 
     child and learned the business working in his father's store 
     on Georgia Avenue--one of the first self-service stores in 
     the country. In the years in which he built the Giant chain, 
     the retail market for food charged radically. Customers' 
     demands for diversity of choices expanded enormously, 
     requiring steadily larger stores. The standards of food 
     purity and cleanliness rose rapidly, and the consumer 
     movement became a major force in the country. Grocery 
     retailing has always been highly competitive, and many other 
     chains disappeared as expensive specialty shops cut into the 
     top end of the market while, at the discount end, warehouse 
     stores flourished by offering bulk sales.
       Mr. Cohen survived and prospered through innovation. He 
     brought drustores into Giant's supermarkets, and they now 
     dominate the retail drug business in this area. He 
     experimented endlessly and successfully with vertical 
     integration, producing some of the goods for his stores' 
     shelves and selling them under private labels to cut costs. 
     He installed salad bars, and his stores were the first in the 
     country to use scanners to speed up the lines at the checkout 
     counters.
       In a city that loves glitz and notoriety, he chose to live 
     inconspicuously. In a world that encourages highly publicized 
     philanthropy, he usually kept his generosity out of sight. He 
     developed a multibillion dollar company and tried to run it 
     as a family business in which people called each other--
     including the chairman--by their first names. Long ago he 
     closed the executive dining room at the company's 
     headquarters in Landover because he thought that the people 
     who used it could spend their time better lunching with the 
     other employees.
       Some kinds of success are useful, and others are not. Mr. 
     Cohen's career was a strong example of the first kind and, 
     more than useful, it was also constructive. Over the years, 
     Izzy Cohen made countless friends. He also made contributions 
     to the community he lived in, and these will survive and 
     continue to do credit to the vital man who died at the age of 
     83 at his home here in Washington on Wednesday.

                          ____________________