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| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Retail |
| Founded | 1964 |
| Founder | Harold "Mickey" Marden |
| Headquarters | , United States |
Number of locations | 13 |
| Website | https://www.mardens.com/ |
Marden's Surplus and Salvage is an independent family-run chain of retail stores in Maine. It was founded in 1964, and has 13 locations as of 2024.
Marden's started in Fairfield, Maine in 1964, where Harold “Mickey” Marden, a mailman, held auctions of collectibles he'd gathered during rounds of the local auction circuit. Using a “from-the-hip-pricing” model, customers would walk through rows of goods and make their offer to Marden. [1] "It was actually several years of that before products on the floor had prices. Everything was shoot from the hip pricing before that. That’s how the company started," Jake Marden told the Bangor Daily News in a story celebrating the store's 50th anniversary. [1]
Marden's was originally modeled on insurance losses and salvages. The company acquires goods via a bidding process through the insurance company for a warehouse or retailer. As the insurance industry evolved, products were obtained through excess inventory or last-season goods from manufacturers.
Before entering politics, former Maine Governor Paul LePage worked as the general manager of the Marden's location in Waterville.
In 2009, the retailer expanded in Southern Maine with the opening of their Scarborough location. [2] They took over a 119,000-square-foot space that formerly housed a Walmart store.
Marden's stock includes furniture, hardware, mattresses, flooring, clothing, fabric, and footwear. Because the stock in stores frequently changes, the company's slogan is “I should have bought it when I saw it at Marden’s.”
Featured in the media, Marden's commercials at one point featured Birdie Googins, “The Marden’s Lady,” who was played by Maine comedian and actress Karmo Sanders. [3]
Locations include Sanford, Biddeford, Scarborough, [4] Gray, Lewiston, Waterville, Brewer, Ellsworth, Calais, Lincoln, Houlton, Presque Isle, and Madawaska.
The retailer partners with organizations including United Way, A Family for ME, The Maine Children's Home for Little Wanderers, Project Linus, and Kennebec Valley Community College of Maine. In May 2020, Marden's donated PPE to Maine's healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. [5] That same month, they donated $30,000 in canned goods to Maine's Good Shepherd Food Bank. [6]
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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Off-price is a trading format based on discount pricing. Off-price retailers are independent of manufacturers and buy large volumes of branded goods directly from them. The off-price retail model relies on the purchase of over-produced, or excess, branded goods at a lower price, thus being able to sell to consumers at a discount compared to other stores which purchased an initial run. Among the largest retailers of this type are TJX Companies and Ross Stores. The model is more common in countries that import fashion-oriented or household goods, as the discount role in producer countries is usually filled by factory outlets or small-scale open-air marketplaces.
Olympia Sports was a sporting goods retail company. The company was founded in 1975 in Portland, Maine. Before it went under liquidation, Olympia Sports had 152 locations, mostly across New England, New York, and the Mid-Atlantic. It was headquartered in nearby Westbrook, Maine, and had a flagship store in Boston.
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