Description
Weis Markets is a Mid-Atlantic food retailer based in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, It currently operates 196 stores with over 23,000 employees in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, West Virginia, Virginia, and Delaware. As of December 2017, The Weis family owns 65% of the company stock which has been listed on NYSE since 1965.
History
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.
Weis also expanded to western Pennsylvania, opening stores as far west as Altoona, Everett, and Philipsburg, and expanded throughout northeastern Pennsylvania. The company purchased two regional chains in the Poconos and Lehigh Valley region: Mr. Z's, a 14-store chain of IGA supermarkets, in 1992, and King's, a six-store chain based in Hamburg, in 1994. Mr. Z's and King's were operated under separate banners for years before all stores were re-branded as Weis. The westernmost extent of Weis's expansion is along old route 220 with the two stores in Altoona, one on 7th street and one in Park Hills.
Weis's expansion into the Baltimore, Maryland market was successful, but its expansions into the Washington, D.C. market were less successful. Weis opened stores in suburban Washington, D.C. and northern Virginia before retreating from that market, first closing most of its stores in Montgomery County, Maryland, and finally closing all stores in Virginia.
Weis also expanded into northern New Jersey, beginning with a store opened in Newton in 1992. In 2000, another store opened in Flanders; it closed in 2002, two years after its opening. Weis re-entered Flanders in 2014, in a former A&P store adjacent to the location of its first Flanders store. On July 19, 2018 Weis Markets opened a second store in Morris County NJ in the town of Randolph (where a former A&P used to operate before A&P's bankruptcy in 2015).
In 2009, Weis expanded into the Southern Tier of New York with the acquisition of the 11-store Giant Markets chain. Weis closed one former Giant Market in Binghamton in 2012, along with two others in 2014. Eight former Giant Markets continue to operate.
Eastern expansion continued in 2012 as Weis acquired three former Genuardi's stores from Safeway, in the Philadelphia suburbs of Conshohocken, Doylestown and Norristown, on June 16. A former Superfresh store in Towson, Maryland, opened as a Weis in 2012. Weis entered central New Jersey with the purchase of a former Pathmark store in Hillsborough in August 2013. In November 2013, Weis opened its closest store to Philadelphia after acquiring a former Pathmark store in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania. In July 2015, Weis purchased the location and assets of Nell's Shur-fine Market from C&S Wholesale Grocers in Penn Township, York County, Pennsylvania and followed that up in October 2016 with the purchase of a second Nell's location in East Berlin, Pennsylvania.
In May 2016, Weis Markets announced the purchase of five stores from Mars in Baltimore County, Maryland, after that chain announced it was closing all its stores. In July 2016, it was announced that Weis Markets entered into a purchase agreement with Ahold and Delhaize Group for 38 Food Lion locations in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia as part of the divestiture of stores to gain clearance from the Federal Trade Commission for the impending Ahold/Delhaize merger. On October 5, 2016, Weis announced the purchase of Nell's Shur-fine Market in East Berlin, PA from C&S Wholesale Grocers. The company completed the acquisition and conversion of the 44 stores in early November 2016.
On March 9, 2017, Weis Markets opened a 65,000-square-foot (6,039 m2) store in Hampden Township, Pennsylvania, that features a pub, ice cream parlor, expanded takeout food selection, a drive-thru pharmacy, and a beer cafe selling 900 varieties of beer and 500 varieties of wine. In late September 2019, Weis acquired two Thomas' Food Market stores, one in Dallas, Pennsylvania and another in Shavertown, Pennsylvania, reopening the Dallas location under the Weis banner and closing the Shavertown location.
