[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.
____________________