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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 as of 2024 had 13 locations.
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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Bull Moose is an independent retailer and record store chain based in Portland, Maine, USA. The chain has operated since 1989 and has eight locations in Maine and three in New Hampshire.
The retail format influences the consumer's store choice and addresses the consumer's expectations. At its most basic level, a retail format is a simple marketplace, that is; a location where goods and services are exchanged. In some parts of the world, the retail sector is still dominated by small family-run stores, but large retail chains are increasingly dominating the sector, because they can exert considerable buying power and pass on the savings in the form of lower prices. Many of these large retail chains also produce their own private labels which compete alongside manufacturer brands. Considerable consolidation of retail stores has changed the retail landscape, transferring power away from wholesalers and into the hands of the large retail chains.
