ABC Warehouse

Last updated
ABC Warehouse
Type Private
IndustryRetail
Founded1963
FounderGordon Hartunian
Headquarters,
U.S.
Number of locations
ABC Warehouse 42, Mickey Shorr 16, Hawthorne 2
Key people
Martin Hartunian (CEO)
Products Consumer electronics, home appliance
Revenue US$ 374.3 million
Number of employees
1,750

ABC Warehouse, Inc. or ABC Appliance, Inc. is a chain of retail appliance and electronics stores based in Pontiac, Michigan. It was founded in 1963 by Gordon Hartunian, and operates 42 stores in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. The chain also operates 16 Mickey Shorr Mobile Electronics stores [1] and 2 Hawthorne Home Appliances & Electronics stores. They are known for their advertising motto "The Closest Thing To Wholesale". In the last few years ABC has added mattresses and furniture to their retail offerings, including products from Sealy & Lane.

Contents

History

Gordon Hartunian opened the first ABC Warehouse store in a former warehouse in Center Line, Michigan. By 1980, he had opened a second store in Pontiac and a third in Flint. Hartunian was previously employed by another appliance store called Hot & Cold, which closed all of its Detroit stores. [2]

ABC Warehouse was one of the 30 consumer electronics retailers selected in 2007 to participate in an IBM program that tracked metrics on consumer application requests based on data provided by the NTIA. In 2009, General Electric signed a financial contract with the chain to provide the in house ABC credit card. [3] [4]

Advertising

In the 1980s, ABC Warehouse used Ernest P. Worrell in its television advertising. [5] Children were offered a paper Ernest mask in the store.

In the 1990s, ABC commercials featured "The ABC Warehouse Employees Choir" who sung their own songs like "Price Protection" (sung to the tune of Alouette). [6]

From the late 90s to the late 2000s, ABC featured their founder Gordon "Gordy" Hartunian in a series of ads called "Gordyisms". [7]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Best Buy</span> Consumer electronics retailer

Best Buy Co. Inc. is an American multinational consumer electronics retailer headquartered in Richfield, Minnesota. Originally founded by Richard M. Schulze and James Wheeler in 1966 as an audio specialty store called Sound of Music, it was rebranded under its current name with an emphasis on consumer electronics in 1983.

CompUSA was a retailer and reseller of personal computers, consumer electronics, technology products and computer services. Starting with one brick-and-mortar store in 1986 under the name Soft Warehouse, by the 1990s CompUSA had grown into a nationwide big box chain. At its peak, it operated at least 229 locations. Crushed by competition from other brick-and-mortar retailers, corporate oversight which was out of touch with evolving market realities, and a failure to make a strong transition to online sales, CompUSA began closing what they classified as "low performing" locations in 2006. By 2008 only 16 locations were left to be sold to Systemax. In 2012, remaining CompUSA and Circuit City stores were converted to TigerDirect stores, and later closed. As of 2022, CompUSA remains as an online website.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Woolworths Group (Australia)</span> Australian retail company

Woolworths Group Limited is an Australian retail company headquartered in Bella Vista, Sydney, with extensive operations throughout Australia and New Zealand. It is the largest company in Australia by revenue and the second-largest in New Zealand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Circuit City</span> Consumer electronics retailer

Circuit City is an American consumer electronics retail company, which was founded in 1949 by Samuel Wurtzel as the Wards Company, operated stores across the United States, and pioneered the electronics superstore format in the 1970s. After multiple purchases and a successful run on the NYSE, it changed its name to Circuit City Stores Inc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Warehouse Group</span> New Zealand retail group

The Warehouse Group (TWG) was founded by Stephen Tindall in 1982, and is the largest retail group operating in New Zealand. It is a corporate group that consists of The Warehouse, Warehouse Stationery, Torpedo7, Noel Leeming, 1-day and TheMarket.

Consumers Distributing was a catalogue store in Canada and the United States that operated from 1957 to 1996. At its peak, the company operated 243 outlets in Canada and 217 in the United States, including stores in every province in Canada and in the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, California and Nevada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Farmer Jack</span> Supermarket in Michigan. U.S.

Farmer Jack was a supermarket chain based in Detroit, Michigan. At its peak, it operated more than 100 stores, primarily in metropolitan Detroit. In its final years, the chain operated as the Midwest subsidiary of the New Jersey-based A&P Corporation. A&P closed the Farmer Jack chain on July 7, 2007.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Summit Place Mall</span> Shopping mall in Michigan, United States

Summit Place Mall, originally Pontiac Mall, was a shopping mall in Pontiac, Michigan, United States. Opened in 1962 as the first enclosed mall in Michigan, it was built on a 74-acre (30 ha) site located in Waterford Township. After expansions in 1987 and 1993, it comprised more than 1,400,000 square feet (130,000 m2) of retail space. At its peak, it had approximately 200 inline tenants and six anchor stores: Hudson's, Sears, J. C. Penney, Montgomery Ward, Service Merchandise, and Kohl's.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JB Hi-Fi</span> Australian consumer goods retailer

JB Hi-Fi Limited is an Australian consumer electronics and home appliances retail company. It is publicly listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. Its headquarters are located in Southbank, Melbourne, Victoria.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lechmere</span> Defunct American retail store chain

Lechmere ( "leech-meer") was a Massachusetts-based chain of retail stores that closed in 1997. At the time of its closing, it had 27 stores, including 20 in New England. The chain offered electronics, appliances, and various household goods. It also had locations in New York and the Southeastern United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Silo (store)</span> Electronics retailer

Silo was an electronics retailer operated throughout the United States between 1947 and 1995. The western region stores were known for a number of years as "Downings" in Colorado and "Appliance-TV City" in Arizona and California.

Fretter was an electronics and major appliance retailer based in Detroit, founded in the 1950s by Oliver "Ollie" Fretter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E. J. Korvette</span> American chain of discount department stores (1948–1980)

E. J. Korvette, also known as Korvettes, was an American chain of discount department stores, founded in 1948 in New York City. It was one of the first department stores to challenge the suggested retail price provisions of anti-discounting statutes. Founded by World War II veteran Eugene Ferkauf and his friend, Joe Zwillenberg, E. J. Korvette did much to define the idea of a discount department store. It displaced earlier five and dime retailers and preceded later discount stores, like Walmart, and warehouse clubs such as Costco.

Krazy Krazy Audio Video Warehouse was a Canadian retailer of consumer audiovisual electronics. In operation from 1983 to 2009, the chain began to decline in the late 1990s and 2000s due to the changing consumer electronics market. Although no longer operating as a national chain, a few former franchise locations remain in business as independently operated local stores.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suning.com</span> Chinese Retail Company

Suning.com Co., Ltd. formerly Suning Commerce Group Co., Ltd. is one of the largest non-government retailers in China, headquartered in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. Suning has more than 10,000 stores nationwide and its e-commerce platform, Suning.com ranks among top three Chinese B2C companies. The operation categories include physical merchandise, such as home appliances, 3C products, books, general merchandise, household commodities, cosmetics and baby care products, content products and service merchandise with the total number of SKU exceeding 3 million. It was listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2004. In 2021, Suning.com ranked at 328th on the Fortune Global 500 list.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Art Van Furniture</span> Defunct American furniture retailer

Art Van Furniture Inc. was an American furniture retail store chain, with stores across the Midwestern United States. Founded in 1959, the company was headquartered in Warren, Michigan, and was the largest furniture retailer in the Midwest at its peak. In 2020, the company filed for bankruptcy and closed all of its stores.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unicomer Group</span>

Unicomer Group, is a multinational retailing and consumer finance group headquartered in San Salvador, El Salvador with regional offices in Miami, Trinidad, Jamaica, Costa Rica. It operates several chains of retail brands in the consumer durables sector, specializing in furniture, audio & video, appliances, and electronics in Central America, the Caribbean, South America and United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Currys plc</span> British electrical and telecommunications retailer

Currys plc, formerly Dixons Carphone plc, is a British multinational electrical and telecommunications retailer and services company headquartered in London, England. It was formed on 7 August 2014 by the merger of Dixons Retail and Carphone Warehouse Group. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange, and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.

Federated Group was an American chain of consumer electronics retail stores with 67 stores in California, Texas, Arizona, and Kansas. The company was founded by Wilfred Schwartz in 1970 and opened the first deep discount consumer electronics "superstore" in the United States. In 1987, Federated Group was the fourth-largest discounter of consumer electronics in the U.S. Its company headquarters were in City of Commerce, California and later in Sunnyvale, California. Federated Group was sold in 1987 to Atari and sold again in 1989 to Silo.

References

  1. Kepos, P. (1994). International directory of company histories. Vol. 10. St. James Press. ISBN   9781558623255 . Retrieved 2015-01-29.
  2. Brauer, Molly (October 16, 1996). "The ABCs of Success". Detroit Free Press. Retrieved 5 January 2017.
  3. "findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_20090803/ai_n32406221/". findarticles.com. Retrieved 2015-01-29.
  4. United States Congress Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (2007). The Digital Television Transition: Government and Industry Perspectives : Hearing Before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, United States Senate, One Hundred Tenth Congress, First Session, October 17, 2007. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 92.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  5. "History of ABC Appliance, Inc. FundingUniverse". fundinguniverse.com. Retrieved 2015-01-29.
  6. "ABC Warehouse (1993) - YouTube". youtube.com. Retrieved 2015-01-29.
  7. "ABC Warehouse - Gordyisms". abcwarehouse.com. Archived from the original on 2015-02-06. Retrieved 2015-01-29.