Weis Market

Weis Markets, Inc.

Type	Public
Traded as	: WMK
Industry	Retail grocery
Founded	1912 (Sunbury, Pennsylvania) by Harry and Sigmund Weis
Headquarters	Sunbury, Pennsylvania
Number of locations	204
Key people	Jonathan Weis, Chairman, President and CEO
Website	www.weismarkets.com

Weis Markets, Inc. is a Mid-Atlantic food retailer based in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, It currently operates 204 stores in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, West Virginia, Virginia, and Delaware.

Weis Markets was founded as Weis Pure Foods in 1912 in Sunbury, Pennsylvania by two brothers, Harry and Sigmund Weis. Their store has been noted as "revolutionary", as it did not operate on credit—sales were only for cash. At the time, similar stores operated on credit, allowing customers to build a tab that would be paid periodically. Cash sales were a sign of a growing working class earning steady paychecks—and they also helped lower prices by up to 25%.

The second Weis store opened in 1915 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Harrisburg would remain an important market for Weis, helping to anchor the central Pennsylvania region that Weis would dominate for decades.

The Weis brothers expanded their chain rapidly, opening dozens of small, in-town grocery stores throughout central Pennsylvania. Their chain peaked at 115 stores in 15 central Pennsylvania counties by 1933. As the supermarket industry shifted to larger, self-service stores, Weis adapted the format of its stores. The company closed several corner grocery stores in Harrisburg in 1938, replacing them with their first self-service, consolidated supermarket. Over the next two decades, the company continued with this strategy, and it had consolidated all of its corner grocery stores into supermarkets, with 35 stores by 1955. In newspaper ads of the 1940s, Weis referred to its stores first as Weis Super Markets, then Weis Self-Service Markets, and finally Weis Markets.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Weis expanded its reach, first to York and then Lancaster by 1960. Weis expanded to Maryland in July 1967, opening its first non-Pennsylvania store in Hagerstown, followed by a store in Frederick in August Its first store in the Wilkes-Barre area opened in 1967. In November 1967, the company purchased the five-store Albany Public Markets chain based in Albany, New York in an all-cash transaction. It operated Albany Public Markets as a subsidiary, keeping the company's management team intact. Weis closed its Albany Public Markets chain in October 1986, leasing the nine stores to Grand Union.