Tom Charley and Mike Charley are the fourth-generation owners of Charley Family Shop n’ Save, a three-store group in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area. Tom Charley spoke to The Griffin Report’s Lorrie Griffith about the company’s origins – rooted in the American dream – and how the fourth generation is working to keep the business strong 125 years after their great-grandfather first came to this country and got into the food business.
Tell me about your path to getting into the grocery business.
My great-grandfather immigrated from Syria in 1900 when he was 16 years old. He didn’t speak English or anything; it’s a crazy story.
He immigrated to western Pennsylvania and started selling produce off the back of a bike, a rickshaw kind of thing. He grew that and got a truck, and then got a warehouse, and then built what became Charley Brothers, which is a food wholesale distributor out of western Pennsylvania. My grandfather and his two brothers built that business.
My father [Ray], at the time [the 1970s], was in law school, and my grandfather and his brothers were looking at succession planning. They didn’t have an obvious successor because my dad wasn’t in the industry at the time, so they ended up selling the wholesale business to Supervalu in, I think, ’79.
A couple of years later, my dad decided he wanted to get back into the industry. My grandfather, while he wasn’t the owner of the business anymore, had stayed on as kind of an advisor to the warehouse, so he was still very connected and very involved in the industry…