SOL PRICE

Sol Price grew up in New York City and earned a law degree from USC. He practiced law in San Diego but became more interested in retail innovation.

In 1954 he founded FedMart, one of the first membership-based discount stores in the country — you paid a small fee to shop there, which filtered out browsers and rewarded serious buyers. FedMart grew to over 40 stores before Price sold it to German retailer Hugo Mann in 1975.

He immediately turned around and founded Price Club in 1976 in an old airplane hangar in San Diego — a no-frills warehouse where members could buy in bulk at dramatically lower prices. Jim Sinegal, who had worked for Price since FedMart, co-founded Costco eight years later using the Price Club model as the template.

Price Club merged with Costco in 1993, creating PriceCostco. Price also established the Price Family Foundation, which became one of San Diego's most significant philanthropic institutions.

FedMart was Price's first creation — a membership discount retailer founded in 1954 that proved the concept of charging admission to shop. He sold it to Hugo Mann in 1975, which he later described as a painful mistake.

Price Club, founded in 1976, was the purer expression of his model: an airplane hangar in San Diego, bulk merchandise, membership fees, razor-thin markups. The 1993 merger with Costco created PriceCostco, which became Costco Wholesale.

His son Robert Price remained active in the business and in the Price Family Foundation, which focuses on community development and civic projects in San Diego.

Price was a builder and a teacher, not a trader. He built businesses around a single principle — give members extraordinary value by keeping costs brutally low — and then ran them with operational discipline until the model was proven.

He mentored the next generation of warehouse operators, including Jim Sinegal, who he essentially trained from the ground up. His investment approach was concentrated and long-term: build one thing right, not many things adequately.

Inventing the warehouse club model. Every Costco, Sam's Club, and BJ's Wholesale location in the world traces its DNA back to Sol Price's experiment in that San Diego airplane hangar in 1976.

The concept he created now generates hundreds of billions in annual retail revenue globally. That's a legacy most founders never come close to.

Selling FedMart to Hugo Mann in 1975. Price later acknowledged it was a decision made for the wrong reasons, and restarting with Price Club — while ultimately successful — meant rebuilding from zero in his late 50s.

Had he held FedMart and evolved it into a warehouse model, the path of American retail could have been different.

Volume beats margin, every time. Price believed the membership fee created a unique dynamic: members who paid to shop would shop more loyally, enabling the retailer to take almost no markup and still generate enormous revenue.

The membership fee also covered most of the company's operating profit, meaning the merchandise itself could be sold at near cost. This was a structural insight that most retailers still haven't fully internalized.

His son Robert Price worked alongside him at Price Club and remained involved in the business after the Costco merger. Sol Price was deeply devoted to San Diego as a community, and the Price Family Foundation continued his philanthropic commitments after his death in December 2009 at age 93.

Undergraduate studies and law degree from the University of Southern California (USC). Practiced law in San Diego before pivoting entirely to retail.

He often noted that the analytical discipline of law helped him think clearly about business models in ways that purely retail-trained executives sometimes missed.

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