After 70 years, Ferri's Supermarket in Murrysville to close

Dan Ferri can remember hitchhiking during the early 1960s from his Turtle Creek home to his family’s grocery store in Murrysville, where he and his brother Bill would stock cans at night.

“My cousin had a grocery store in Wilkinsburg, and I remember some nights when we’d drive out there, load up the truck, drive back to Murrysville and unload it and we’d be up all night,” said Ferri, 81, of Penn Township. “And then I slept in school the next day.”

After 70 years in business, Ferri’s IGA Supermarket announced this week that it will close at the end of May. And while it is just one part of Ferri Enterprises, whose holdings encompass a restaurant, a hotel, shopping centers and more, it will mean the loss of a longtime community staple.

One customer shopping Tuesday at Ferri’s said she met her husband there. Another said she’d been walking the store’s aisles since she was 5. The store’s manager has worked there for a literal half-century.

“The people here are so kind,” said Dan’s son Adam Ferri, 37, of Washington Township, president of Ferri Enterprises. “You walk in and you see familiar faces smiling, and it’s not like that at other stores.”

The Ferri family certainly earned the recent outpouring of goodwill from customers on social media, having gotten its start in the grocery business back in 1918.

“The first store was a fruit market in Turtle Creek,” Dan Ferri said. “That was my dad and his brothers.”

In 1954, Dan’s brother Ed returned from military service during the Korean War, and told his father he needed his own store. After passing on a property in Monroeville, the family settled on its current location at the corner of Old William Penn Highway and Vincent Hall Drive.

“It was just a general store with an empty storeroom built on,” Dan said. “There were two old gas pumps out front that hadn’t been used for years. I was 13 years old and I came in to help every night at the store.”

The first two years were tough, he said.

“We were bringing in about $50 or $100 a day, not good,” he said. “My dad was a builder, so he built a section in the back for a butcher shop, and we became known for our meats. That helped our profit increase tremendously and let us get started in produce and other areas.”

Soon all three of Dan’s brothers were home from Korea, “and they were breaking out walls and eventually expanding the store to twice the original size,” he said. Beginning life as Ferri’s Supermarket, the store would go through a succession of affiliations over the years.

“We were one of the first four Foodlands, when we changed to that around 1960,” Dan said. The store has been a Shop’n Save, a Shur Save and today, Ferri’s IGA Supermarket.

The family also began to diversify. In 1967, they bought the Lamplighter, which Eugene and Dan Ferri left the grocery store to run. Their brother Joe operated the hardware store below the supermarket.

Adam Ferri said it was a great way to grow up.

“My Uncle Ed, Aunt Carol and Aunt Peg would always be in the supermarket office; I’d see my Uncle Joe downstairs,” he said.

As the store’s business started taking off, Dan’s brother Bill graduated from pharmacy school and took over the in-store pharmacy.

“It lost money right up until Bill started running it,” Dan said. “He turned it around in no time, and that had a lot to do with our growth back then.”

A pharmacy has also played a sizable role in the family’s decision to close the store.

In 2021, Mainline Pharmacy entered a four-year lease for space in Ferri’s. But after just two years, the pharmacy abruptly closed, giving store owners just two weeks’ notice. Nine Mainline pharmacies in the area announced plans to close in February.

For a community grocery store which was already under economic pressure, the loss of the pharmacy was too much, Dan Ferri said.

“We were already struggling, and that cut our business by another 20%,” he said.

“We’re subsidizing the store more than most rational people would,” Adam Ferri said. “We really wanted to transition to a different supermarket. That would’ve been ideal. In a perfect world, we would have found out about the pharmacy earlier, and been able to plan a transition. But it had such a big impact.”

The family held a meeting with the store’s 60 employees earlier this month, and in addition to announcing the news, also circulated a list of the current job openings within Ferri Enterprises and the Ferri Land Company, which owns the Townsquare Professional Building, The Village of Murrysville, Creekside Shoppes and Franklin Plaza shopping centers, Ferri’s Village Hardware, and the Lamplighter and Holiday Inn Express in Salem.

“It hurts me to see things happen this way,” Dan Ferri said. “You get used to coming here, walking through the place and knowing that I grew up here.”

The company also posted a public letter to customers, thanking them for their patronage.

“Your trust and loyalty have meant the world to us, and we will cherish the memories of serving you each week at Ferri’s Supermarket,” the letter reads.