What was belk before

Most Charlotteans only know the area because they pass through it on the way to the beach. That 1,square-foot building housed the original Belk, which was founded in by William Henry Belk, who was joined soon after by his brother, John.

That was the nice store to go to. Bob Morgan, head of the Charlotte Chamber, has a similar story. Morgan sold menswear at the Eastland Mall store.

That store is gone. So, too, is the uptown location. In some ways, Belk has morphed into a modern retail chain. Yet the company has trouble breaking free of its past. Until , the logo had not changed since Johnny Belk, fifty-three, now runs the company with his brother Tim Belk, fifty-seven.

O ver an early breakfast in late August, Johnny Belk talks about what the new Belk brand means. Back from a family trip to the Olympics and an extended stay in Europe, Belk arrives armed with the morning papers and a willingness to chat over a breakfast sandwich, though he is on a tight schedule.

He will have to leave for a company board meeting in an hour. The boardroom is a long way from the back room where Belk first worked when he joined the family business as a kid. He says it was a good way to learn how to deal with the family part of the family business.

While the family drama is diminished, it is tough to run a department store these days. But Johnny Belk says profits have been up for ten consecutive quarters.

And they forged ahead in a way markedly different from other retailers. T hey started with the logo. She started at the Charlotte headquarters about five and a half years ago. It is a heritage to which many Charlotteans feel a connection.

She joined the staff at age twenty-two, and worked her way up from a post-college job selling crystal in the home department of a Wilmington location to her current position as the assistant store manager at the four-story, ,square-foot flagship store at SouthPark.

She likes the marketing changes, but cautions that the challenge will be to retain customers like her mother, who has been shopping at Belk for decades. We have so many people that come in and want to tell you how they know the Belk family and they remember when … and you get that wherever you go. I hear stories all the time. He could take advantage of his discounts from vendors who normally gave him 5 percent off if he paid bills promptly. The policy meant turning over a lot of stock during the year, but he was prepared to take the chance.

He carried through with his lower prices, sold for cash only, and promised full value and full service. If a customer was unhappy with goods, he knew Belk would make good on the sale without any questions. If a man paid cash for his goods, Belk said, he would be happier than if he had a debt hanging over his head.

As came to a close, Belk tallied his accounts after six months of business. The New York Racket was a success. The promise that more could be achieved sent Belk to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York, where he scouted out bargains, close-outs, bankruptcy sales, and deals from merchants on the narrow streets of Manhattan. The eager young man from the South won friends easily in the market and established relationships with merchants who were still selling to him thirty and forty years later.

Years of listening to salesmen had provided an education beyond what he could have found in a college classroom. Experience had taught Belk how to buy. He knew the prices of raw materials and what labor was involved in making a pair of shoes or a shirt.

As a result, he bought well. When the goods arrived in Monroe, Belk sold them straight from their heavy wooden packing crates. With each sale he turned a small profit, and he was soon back on the road again. As the business grew, Belk hired more clerks, but he needed someone who could tend the store in his absence, in whom he could have absolute and unqualified confidence to serve customers as well as he did.

John had married two years earlier and begun a family. Times were tough, but he had earned enough to repay a portion of the money he had borrowed from his brother for his education. Leave medicine, he urged his brother, and come into business. They talked it over through the night. By daybreak, John had decided that his future was in retailing, not medicine.

John took a one-half interest in the business and moved to Monroe with his wife and young daughter. As soon as a painter could be found, the New York Racket sign came down and was replaced by one that read "W.

Belk and Bro. William Henry Belk was ready to sell anybody anything. His store was a combination of services, part novelty and part dry goods, which aimed for the business of the solid, hard-working people in the community and in the county. He promoted one-cent items—pencils, fishhooks, matches, blacking , marbles, sheets of paper, soap, and buttons—but his stock was heaviest in overalls for the well-digger, spectacles for the grandmother, and suits for Sunday meetings.

Belk had a feeling for the working people. He knew they wanted high-quality goods for their hard-earned dollars. He searched for ways to promote his trade in the city and beyond. When country folks came to town to load their wagons with supplies, he arranged with some to have a Belk sign painted on the side of their wagons in exchange for extra bolts of cloth.

Christmas brought a new level of success. Although others also sold staples at low prices for cash, William Henry Belk held his own against stiff competition. Sales for were six times that. Soon other Charlotte merchants were imitating Belk.

The field of credit disaster, the slaughter pens of the sheriff and the auction rooms are our prolific play-grounds. Belk replied by upping the ante. He opened a "bargain shoe counter" and offered to outfit men, ladies, misses, and children at even lower prices. He negotiated with manufacturers and mills in the area for bargains on piece goods and the best fabrics.

Belk also shopped the Cannon mills in Kannapolis and even invested in textile operations and other enterprises that kept him close to the demands of the market. He added mail-order service and favored one-cent items, from fishhooks to marbles, that helped draw young customers into the store. And he often worked as his own "puller-in," standing at the front doors chatting with passersby and inviting them into his store.

By Belk had established a loose cooperative buying network that tied together the purchasing power of the Belk stores in Charlotte, Monroe, Union, and Chester, as well as two other stores in which the Belk brothers had no financial interest. They purchased goods in large lots and passed the savings on to their partners. A buyer in New York scouted the market on their behalf to find bargains in hats, for example, and the Belks bought as many as fifteen hundred pairs of pants at once Customers would find the Belk brothers all over their stores.

They were the first in the building each morning, organizing the display tables and merchandise for the day and supervising the young check boys as they swept the floors and pulled the tarpaulins off the display tables. Throughout the day, when clerks were overrun with business, Henry waded into the crowd of customers, eager to sell and thriving on the exchange with people. He always carried a small pair of scissors in his vest pocket, which he used to snip the corner of a measure of cloth before he tore it across with a flourish.

The brothers remained on duty until the late evening hours. Closing time was simply a function of the traffic and the competition; no store wanted its selling floor dark when another store up the street still had bright lights burning for customers. In , the Belks and the Leggett brothers agreed that the Leggetts would own 80 percent of the stores they opened, with Belk Brothers Company owning the remaining 20 percent. In the past, the Belks had always owned the majority of their stores.

This arrangement formed the foundation of Belk's unusual organizational scheme. The years between and were prosperous for retailing. Competition, however, began to creep up on the Belks. Then the stock market crash of slowed Belk's sales growth, but its stores stayed open. Belk took advantage of other companies' misfortune by acquiring defunct stores, netting 22 stores in and In , Belk opened a record 27 stores, expanding geographically into Tennessee and Georgia in the process.

Charlotte was once again becoming a booming center of commerce in the South, and Belk expanded its headquarters store in that city. This location evolved into the organization's operational headquarters, consolidating purchasing, assisting with taxes and merchandise distribution, and providing other services for all affiliated stores. By , Belk was doing business in locations in seven states. In response to growing competition from such national chains as JC Penney, Montgomery Ward, and Sears and Roebuck, which were thriving in larger cities, Belk stores were remodeled and expanded.

Belk Stores Association had formed in the s, gathering the new store managers for quarterly meetings. By the late s, the group was too large to gather for meetings four times a year, so it met at annual conventions.

Belk Buying Service was formally set up in World War II defense spending enhanced the economy, and, by the war's end, sales were two-and-one-half times what they had been in This helped pay off Depression debts and feed expansion. The Belks opened 25 stores in alone and achieved a net increase of more than 60 stores between the end of World War II and the close of the decade.

In , founder William Belk died at the age of He had worked as the head of the company up until the time of his death. After William Belk's death, his son Henry took his place. The founder's other sons, John and Tom, were also active in the company. Six months after his father's death, Henry opened the company's first shopping center store in Florida.

This store marked a dramatic break from Belk traditions: a New York design firm created a fancy interior, music was played, and merchandise was displayed for self-service. This contrasted sharply with the Belk stores' trademark features of spare, no-nonsense decor and an army of well-trained sales clerks.

Henry opened several more stores afterward without consulting his family, and by legal disputes were brewing among family members and other shareholders. Although lawsuits were filed, they eventually were dropped. Later that year, Belk Stores Services, Inc.

Though BSS cut all ties with Henry's chain of department stores in November , family feuding would continue throughout the next four decades. John would later advance to chairman of BSS, with Tom as president. The Belks' private-label business was now thriving, and by it accounted for a major share of the buying office's inventory. In the late s, the Belks department stores had nearly peaked in the South, with stores in 16 states.

In , Belk acquired its only viable competitor in the region, the Efird department stores. During the s, the company had to adjust to a changing retail environment in the South.

Stores that could once count on their reputations as local institutions found themselves in the midst of a highly mobile population that was attracted to the offerings of big-city stores. The largely autonomous and divergent stores making up the Belk group were not prepared to compete. A more mobile society, newly popular shopping centers, and the South's expanding economy presented BSS with the task of uniting its network of stores. In , there were stores in 17 states.

By , the stores were, for the first time, presented to the public as a unit instead of a string of independent operations. Change was still slow, however.

At a time when more buyers were using credit, 87 percent of Belk's sales were still cash. In , extensive meetings were held by BSS and its long-range planning committees to chart the company's future. Meanwhile, more stores were added to the fold: 14 opened in and 16 in The new stores were larger and used modern management techniques, such as computerized payrolls and centralized personnel departments.

As planning and coordination gained in importance, so did BSS's role.