Skaggs Companies

In 1921, Marion Barton Skaggs moved to Portland, Oregon, purchased a home in the Alameda neighborhood and established four groceries in town, in part by buying the Freeman grocer and the Java Coffee Company.

Skaggs opened Payless Drug Stores in Tacoma, Washington, which soon expanded across the western United States.

Skaggs retained California Pay Less Stores, which became part of Thrifty PayLess, and which are now owned by Rite Aid.

His son Lorenzo L. Skaggs, who had been involved in the predecessor to Safeway, founded the Pay-Less chain in 1937 in Rochester, Minnesota.

In 1942, these chains merged with others and formed the Owners Service Company, shortened to Osco.

American Stores, which owned Acme Markets and Alpha Beta, was acquired in 1979 by Skaggs Drug Centers, which adopted the American Stores Company name, and relocated the company headquarters to Salt Lake City, Utah.

Stores in several markets having both an Alpha Beta supermarket and a Skaggs Drug Center drugstore presence were combined (or expanded) to combination food and drug stores and re-branded Skaggs-Alpha Beta.

American replaced the Skaggs-Alpha Beta name with that of Jewel-Osco on all 76 stores in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arkansas.