Pick-N-Pay Supermarkets

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

Pick-N-Pay began with Edward Silverberg’s small Cleveland Heights dairy store in 1928. After building Farmview Creamery Stores, Silverberg opened a self-service supermarket on East 185th Street in 1938 and called it Pick-N-Pay. By 1940, the whole operation wore the Pick-N-Pay Supermarkets name—because apparently the business plan was exactly what it said on the sign.

Cook Coffee Co. acquired the 10-store chain in 1951. Its 1959 purchase of Foodtown enlarged Pick-N-Pay to 38 stores and shifted operations into Foodtown’s Maple Heights headquarters. Cook sold the 57-store business in 1972 to an investor group led by Julius Kravitz, restoring Pick-N-Pay as an independent Cleveland grocery force. Bigger stores, serious meat and produce departments, and Eagle Stamp books helped make weekly shopping feel like a modest civic ritual.

In 1978, Pick-N-Pay acquired Boston’s First National Stores and became First National Supermarkets, Inc., headquartered in Maple Heights. Cleveland stores increasingly carried the Finast identity. Netherlands-based Ahold acquired First National in 1988, and the last Pick-N-Pay store closed in 1994.

Our Pick-N-Pay Supermarkets collection celebrates the carts, stamps, circulars, and fluorescently lit optimism of Greater Cleveland grocery runs—when the checkout line was long, the coupons were clipped, and dinner was waiting somewhere beyond aisle seven.