By 1921, M.B. Skaggs owned multiple stores in Idaho and Montana. M.B. Skaggs moved to Portland, Oregon in 1921, and he established four groceries in town that year, in part by buying a grocer and a coffee company. The chain, which operated as two separate businesses, Skaggs Cash Stores and Skaggs United Stores, grew quickly, and Skaggs enlisted the help of his five brothers to grow the network of stores. M.B.'s business strategy, to give his customers value and to expand by keeping a narrow profit margin, proved spectacularly successful. By 1926, he had opened 428 Skaggs stores in 10 states. M.B. almost doubled the size of his business that year when he merged his company with 322 Sam Seelig Company stores and incorporated as Safeway, Inc., because he thought that a chain that would outlive him should not carry his name. The point of the name was that the grocery operated on a cash-and-carry basis – it did not offer credit, as grocers traditionally had done. It was the "safe way" to buy food because a family could not get into debt via its grocery bill (as many families did at the time, a contributing cause of the Great Depression). In 1926, Charles E. Merrill, the founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm, saw an opportunity to consolidate the West Coast grocery industry. Towards this end, he purchased the 322-store Safeway chain of W.R.H. Weldon, who wished to exit retailing and concentrate on wholesale. Then, in June 1926, Merrill offered Skaggs either $7 million outright or $1.5 million plus 30,000 shares in the merged firm. Skaggs took the latter. On July 1, 1926, Safeway merged with the 673 stores from Skaggs United Stores of Idaho and Skaggs Cash Stores of California. On completion of the Skaggs/Safeway merger, M. B. Skaggs became the Chief Executive of the business. Two years later, Skaggs listed Safeway on the New York Stock Exchange. In the 1930s, Safeway introduced produce pricing by the pound, adding "sell by" dates on perishables, nutritional labeling, and some of the first parking lots. The merger instantly created the largest chain of grocery stores west of the Mississippi. In the 1930s, Charles E. Merrill temporarily left Merrill Lynch to help manage Safeway. At the time of the merger, the company was headquartered in Reno, Nevada. In 1929, it was relocated to a former grocery warehouse in Oakland, California. Safeway