This new release from Kansas City Star Books tells the story of Isaac and Michael Katz, who changed forever our definition of drug store. It could be a prescription for our economic times. Clearly the Katz boys were ahead of theirs. Sons of immigrants, they started with a fruit stand in Kansas City s West Bottoms. In 1914 they acquired two cigar stands downtown and turned them into drug stores. But that was just the beginning. Isaac, who walked with a limp and quit school at age 14 to sell newspapers on the railroad, hardly had a moment when he wasn t innovating. They expanded to two stores, four, then eight. Other druggists filled prescriptions. But Katz began stocking cameras, cosmetics, clocks, shirts, pets and the best selection of discounted smokes, beer and whiskey in town. They treated customers like kings. By 1970 they had 65 stores throughout the Midwest and annual sales of more than $100 million. Let s go to Katz had become a refrain. The story of how they did it, and what happened then, unfolds in the pages of The Kings of Cut-Rate: The Very American Story of Isaac and Michael Katz.
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