They started out selling milk and bread out of a truck. Who would have thought the company that sprang up from that early-morning venture would net them 140 million shekels? But Aryeh Baum has no desire to retire. Instead, he’s creating more and more stores for budget-conscious shoppers to fill up their carts and get out in a hurry.
Aryeh Baum, joint owner of the Osher Ad chain and a trailblazer in Israel’s retail supermarket industry, asks to see the list of questions. He reads rapidly: “‘What’s my background?’ Not interesting. ‘How did I go from being an avreich in Ashdod to the owner of a huge supermarket chain?’ Not interesting. ‘What did I do before that?’ Not interesting. So tell me again, why did you want to interview me?”
Baum — enthusing, evading, explaining, smoking, drinking coffee, accelerating from zero to a hundred in a fraction of a second — is the visionary half of the two-man team that changed the way chareidim (and all other budget-conscious families) shop. He praises his partner, Avrum Moishe Margulis, as the one who focuses on the day-to-day details of the business. “He’s one of those men of action who knows how to turn the wildest dreams into reality. He’s a cannonball,” Baum effuses of his partner and long-time friend.
That’s the combination that got them started one day in 1995. Baum, then a 26-year-old Gerrer kollel yungerman living in Ashdod, turned to his beis medrash colleague, 25-year-old Avrum Moishe, with an idea: “What do you say we open up a little business, selling bread and milk early in the mornings — making life easier for our neighbors and making some cash on the side?”
Baum envisioned the truck; Margulis ordered it. The next morning, Margulis rose at five to accept the order of bread and milk and the sale began.
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