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Stanley P. Goldstein, who within the early Nineteen Sixties helped begin a retail chain named Consumer Value Stores, which, after shortening its identify to CVS — as a result of, he stated, fewer letters meant cheaper indicators — grew into the biggest drugstore chain within the United States, died on Tuesday at his house in Providence, R.I. He was 89.
The firm, which is headquartered in Rhode Island, introduced his dying. Family members advised The Providence Journal that the trigger was most cancers, identified a few month in the past.
Mr. Goldstein was incessantly described as casual and no-nonsense — very like the ethereal, brightly lit retailers that he, a brother and a 3rd founder opened in 1963 to promote cut-price toothpaste, aftershave, Band-Aids and different private care merchandise.
When he retired as chief government in 1998, the corporate had greater than 4,000 shops. Today, it has greater than 9,000 retailers within the United States and its territories, and its revenues are bigger than these of Exxon Mobil, Microsoft and Ford.
Mr. Goldstein, who graduated from the Wharton School on the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, at first had little enthusiasm for retail gross sales, a enterprise that he knew, from the expertise of his father, Israel Goldstein, was cutthroat. Instead, he grew to become a stockbroker.
But when Mr. Goldstein’s father died, his brother Sidney persuaded him to assist take over the daddy’s struggling enterprise, which had begun by promoting baggage and different paper merchandise to grocery shops and had branched out to supply sundry well being and sweetness aids, displayed close to the money registers.
The enterprise barely broke even as a result of large wholesalers had begun promoting the identical merchandise to grocery shops, undercutting the Goldsteins.
The brothers, together with Ralph Hoagland, a product of Harvard Business School who had labored for Procter & Gamble, got here up with a brand new strategy: a stand-alone retailer specializing in low cost private care gadgets.
The first Consumer Value Store opened in a low-income neighborhood of Lowell, Mass., a former manufacturing hub that the Goldsteins and Mr. Hoagland figured would welcome reduced-price merchandise. An indication advised prospects that they might save much more cash by bagging their very own purchases. A second retailer adopted, in Haverhill, Mass.
For the sake of trimming prices on signage, the identify was quickly abbreviated. “All these letters price some huge cash, so we shortened it to CVS,” Stanley Goldstein recalled in The Providence Journal in 2017.
The chain quickly expanded to 42 shops, together with the primary with pharmacies. In 1969, the corporate was bought to the Melville Corporation, a retailing big whose chains included Thom McAn sneakers, Ok-B Toys and Marshalls low cost clothes.
That yr, Mr. Hoagland, whose politics have been formed by the Nineteen Sixties counterculture, left the corporate after an article in The Boston Globe angered some Melville administrators by reporting that he had given cash to a faction of the antiwar Students for a Democratic Society. Mr. Goldstein grew to become CVS’s president, the title Mr. Hoagland had held within the early years.
“Ralph was the wild man who’d push the envelope,” Mr. Goldstein later recalled of CVS’s early days. “Sid was fairly conservative. And I used to be within the center.”
Stanley Goldstein was born on June 5, 1934, in Woonsocket, R.I., one in all 4 sons of Israel and Etta (Halpern) Goldstein. The household house was the bottom flooring of a three-family constructing recognized in working-class New England on the flip of the final century as a triple-decker, a construction that largely housed immigrants, who had been arriving in waves.
He married Merle Katz in 1960. She survives him, as do two sons, Larry and Gene, and 4 grandchildren. His brother Sidney, who retired from CVS in 1987, died in 1995.
CVS grew quickly by shopping for regional drugstore chains and opening new areas. It grew to become Melville’s largest division, and Mr. Goldstein’s function with the company guardian expanded. In 1986, he grew to become president and chief government of Melville, which was primarily based in Rye, N.Y. A yr later, at age 52, he was named chairman.
But in 1995, Mr. Goldstein decided that Melville had grown unwieldy and wanted to be damaged up. Marshalls was bought to the company guardian of T.J. Maxx. The shoe and toy shops have been spun off. As chairman, he retained CVS, altering the identify Melville to CVS Corporation, and moved its places of work to Woonsocket, R.I.
After stepping away from lively management, Mr. Goldstein remained on the CVS board by means of 2006.
