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American Freight Appliances & Furniture | |
Company type | Subsidiary |
Industry | Retail |
Predecessor |
|
Founded | 1968Kansas City, Missouri (Sears Surplus) 1994 in Lima, Ohio (American Freight) | in
Founder | Steve Belford (American Freight) [1] |
Headquarters | , |
Number of locations | 370 [1] (March 2023) |
Key people | Peter Corsa (CEO) Jeffrey Seghi (CFO) [1] |
Products | Furniture, mattresses and home appliances |
Number of employees | 2,000 (2022) |
Parent | Franchise Group, Inc [3] |
Website | americanfreight.com |
American Freight Appliances & Furniture, or American Freight, is an American retail furniture chain.
In 1968, Sears opened a Sears Surplus store in Kansas City. This was the first of its kind operated by the Sears brand.
In 1994, the Surplus stores were renamed to Sears Outlet.
In 2008, Apparel was introduced to stores and served as a liquidation outlet for Lands' End.
In 2012, parent Sears Holdings spun off Sears Outlet along with Sears (Authorized) Hometown Stores, Sears Home Appliance and Showroom Stores, and Sears Appliance and Hardware Stores to form Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores, Inc (SHOS). The new company became its own independent, publicly traded company listed on NASDAQ. [4] [5] At the time of the separation, there were 122 Sears Outlet Stores in operation. [6] [7]
The company partnered with the National Volunteer Fire Council in November 2013 to raise money for local fire departments. [8] The objective of the campaign was to provide firehouses with funds to improve resources for training, equipment, and financial support. [8]
When former parent Sears Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on October 15, 2018, Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores was not affected due to having been spun off from Sears since 2012. [9]
In April 2019, it was announced that TransformCo would acquire the company. [10] [11] However it was reported a few days later that Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores acquisition offer was rejected, and as a result Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores could have faced liquidation, similarly to Sears Holdings but which was acquired by ESL Investments a few months earlier. [12] [13] [14]
In June 2019, it was announced that TransformCo would acquire the remaining shares in the company. [15] Under the terms of the new merger agreement, Sears Hometown was given a specified period of time to market and sell its Sears Outlet and Buddy's Home Furnishing Stores businesses (together, the "Outlet Segment") to a third party for not less than $97.5 million. If the Outlet Segment is sold in accordance with the terms, it would not be acquired by Transform in the acquisition of Sears Hometown. [16] At the time of the announcement, Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores had 491 Hometown stores and 126 Outlet stores in 49 states, Puerto Rico and Bermuda. [17]
In August 2019, Franchise Group, Inc., the parent of Liberty Tax, announced plans to acquire the Sears Outlet division from Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores, [18] and on October 23, 2019, Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores completed its sale of Sears Outlet division to Franchise Group. [19] TransformCo completed the acquisition of the remainder of Sears Hometown at the end of the same business day. [20]
The first American Freight store was founded by Steve Belford in Lima, Ohio in 1994 as American Freight Furniture & Mattress. [21]
By 2014, the company was operating 95 stores in 18 states, and October that year was acquired by an affiliate of private equity firm The Jordan Company of New York. [22]
The company was acquired by Franchise Group for US$450M [3] on February 14, 2020, and combined with the former Sears Outlets under the brand American Freight Furniture, Mattress, Appliance. [23]
Sears, Roebuck and Co., commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald, with what began as a mail ordering catalog company migrating to opening retail locations in 1925, the first in Chicago. In 2005, the company was bought by the management of the American big box discount chain Kmart, which upon completion of the merger, formed Sears Holdings. Through the 1980s, Sears was the largest retailer in the United States. In 2018, it was the 31st-largest. After several years of declining sales, Sears's parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 15, 2018. It announced on January 16, 2019, that it had won its bankruptcy auction, and that a reduced number of 425 stores would remain open, including 223 Sears stores.
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Rent-A-Center is an American public furniture and electronics rent-to-own company based in Plano, Texas. The company was incorporated in 1986 and as of 2014 operates approximately 2,972 company-owned stores in the United States, Puerto Rico and Mexico, accounting for approximately 35% of the rent-to-own market in the United States based on store count.
Franchise Group, Inc. is an American privately-held holding company that acquires and manages mainly franchise companies. It owns brands in various retail industries including American Freight, Buddy's Home Furnishings, The Vitamin Shoppe, Pet Supplies Plus, Sylvan Learning and Badcock Home Furniture.
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