Marion Barton Skaggs

Marion Barton Skaggs (April 5, 1888 – May 8, 1976) was an American businessman and leading member of the Skaggs Family of retailers who expanded the predecessor of Safeway into a major supermarket chain.

Career Skaggs was an advocate of the cash-and-carry system for grocery stores. His father, S.M. Skaggs, was a Baptist minister, and he was convinced that the prevailing system of credit increased prices since grocers and storekeepers had to wait to get paid and made the customers overly dependent on those grocers and storekeepers. His father established a store in American Falls, Idaho. He sold groceries for cash and passed the savings from not offering credit to customers in the form of lower prices.

On August 15, 1915, Skaggs bought the store from his father for $1,088 , and he continued the cash-and-carry business strategy helping him amass wealth and prominence in the grocery retailing industry. Skaggs' aversion to credit sales is exemplified by an admonition about "the growing evil of installment purchasing".

Skaggs was also against the prevailing high-cost system of the grocer having clerks serving all the needs of each customer. He was an early proponent of the self-service concept. Items were kept within the customers' reach, on shelves that hugged the walls, with aisles clear for customers to walk comfortably.

In 1926, Skaggs' company bought a chain of stores, called Skaggs Cash Stores, developed by his older brother O.P. Skaggs. The same year, Skaggs' company merged with Sam Selig's Southern California-based stores, some of which were called Safeway Stores. Skaggs decided that the stores should not carry his name after his eventual death. He first renamed them Skaggs-Safeway, and then he renamed them all Safeway by 1928.

In 1931, Skaggs sold controlling interest to Wall Street's Charles E. Merrill, became chief executive of the company, and retired from the Board of Directors in 1941.