Lee's Discount Department Stores?

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retail_person_247
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Lee's Discount Department Stores?

Post by retail_person_247 »

Any of you guys familiar with this chain?

They were the discount department store division of the J.J. Newberry (A lot of people believe Britt's to be the discount division, but they were a department store similar to JCPenney, like what TG&Y was doing with their "Aim For the Best" chain)

Here's the J.J. Newberry annual report from 1970 which has some information of Lee's:

https://archive.org/details/jjnewberryc ... 1/mode/1up

It appears that Newberry's ran a variety store, department store, and discount department store chain all under the Lee's name?

According to the annual report, the first discount department store under the Lee's name open in Aiken, SC

The only other source I can find about these stores even existing is a New York TImes article about the grand opening about the first location:

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/11/27/arch ... -unit.html

Anybody know where exactly these stores were?

Was the chain scrapped in favor of Murphy's Mart when McCrory acquired Newberry's?

Taking a look a the annual report for the next year it would appear that there were 3 locations by that point
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rich
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Re: Lee's Discount Department Stores?

Post by rich »

Britt's stores were interchangeable with the "junior department stores" Newberry opened under their own name from the late 50s onward. The Britt's name usually was used where Newberry had no existing identity, although there were oddities like the downtown Birmingham Newberry's--a large store that was renamed Britt's for a short time and then rebranded as Newberry's.
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Re: Lee's Discount Department Stores?

Post by pseudo3d »

Britt's opened a department store in Bryan, TX in the early 1970s though it heavily leaned fashion when most department stores were full-line. It was 60,000 square feet though and in the late 1970s was kicked out for a J.C. Penney (which lasted less than a decade in the spot before it moved to another mall in 1985, where it still remains). J.C. Penney did keep the coffee shop that Britt's had, though it did not have an in-store eatery when it moved in 1985.
TW-Upstate NY
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Re: Lee's Discount Department Stores?

Post by TW-Upstate NY »

rich wrote: 04 Dec 2022 19:12 The Britt's name usually was used where Newberry had no existing identity.
Gloversville, NY had BOTH a Newberry's and Britt's. Newberry's was located downtown and Britt's was in a shopping plaza built on the outskirts of town in the early '60's along an arterial highway. I even found a page from the local paper with advertisements from both stores.
Super S
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Re: Lee's Discount Department Stores?

Post by Super S »

rich wrote: 04 Dec 2022 19:12 Britt's stores were interchangeable with the "junior department stores" Newberry opened under their own name from the late 50s onward. The Britt's name usually was used where Newberry had no existing identity, although there were oddities like the downtown Birmingham Newberry's--a large store that was renamed Britt's for a short time and then rebranded as Newberry's.
The Newberry's in Longview, Washington's Triangle Mall started life as Britt's, but eventually took on the Newberry's name. I am not sure exactly what year, but the outside had the neon "Newberry" signs. Inside you could see hints of it being a true department store at one point, but as Newberry's it took on a junky appearance, among other things covers were removed from recessed light fixtures which frequently had burned out bulbs. The store at one point also consolidated into a smaller space. An interesting note is that Longview also had an older downtown Woolworth location which hung on until the 1990s, but the only other Newberrys store in the area was a smaller one that opened in Kelso's Three Rivers Mall in the 1990s but only lasted a few years.

In this area of the country, I am not sure if the Newberry's and Britt's names co-existed anywhere, or if Lee's was used at all.
retail_person_247
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Re: Lee's Discount Department Stores?

Post by retail_person_247 »

retail_person_247 wrote: 03 Dec 2022 22:46 Any of you guys familiar with this chain?

They were the discount department store division of the J.J. Newberry (A lot of people believe Britt's to be the discount division, but they were a department store similar to JCPenney, like what TG&Y was doing with their "Aim For the Best" chain)

Here's the J.J. Newberry annual report from 1970 which has some information of Lee's:

https://archive.org/details/jjnewberryc ... 1/mode/1up

It appears that Newberry's ran a variety store, department store, and discount department store chain all under the Lee's name?

According to the annual report, the first discount department store under the Lee's name open in Aiken, SC

The only other source I can find about these stores even existing is a New York TImes article about the grand opening about the first location:

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/11/27/arch ... -unit.html

Anybody know where exactly these stores were?

Was the chain scrapped in favor of Murphy's Mart when McCrory acquired Newberry's?

Taking a look a the annual report for the next year it would appear that there were 3 locations by that point
I found some Lee's discount store locations

3581 Richland Ave W, Aiken, SC 29801 (was later Kmart, torn down for a Walmart)
2070 Columbia Rd, Orangeburg, SC 29118 (was later Kmart, currently a Dollar General)
Somewhere on Reves Rd, Martinsville, VA (was later Kmart, torn down, unknown what's there currently, if anything)

Not sure where the other locations were, or if there were other locations

Again the J.J. Newberry annual report from 1971 says 3 locations and all of those Kmart locations opened in 1972, the same year that McCrory acquired Newberry's (this was years before the Murphy's acquisition meaning that Lee's didn't go away because of Murphy's Mart)
Last edited by retail_person_247 on 07 Jan 2023 11:32, edited 2 times in total.
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rich
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Re: Lee's Discount Department Stores?

Post by rich »

The link to the annual reports was interesting---I looked at some older ones mostly to look at where they had been expanding and to see if they featured the one store near where I grew-up (they did, it was an early enclosed mall location. The Lee name came from Husted-Lee, a variety chain in the Great Plains and Colorado they had bought previously. They must have figured it would sell well in the South. It's interesting that they had tried to hook-up with Heck's (mostly small towns in the Ohio River Valley and adjacent areas) and MH Fishman (operator of Mason's a chain that, like Newberry was pretty spread out but based in the East; they also had variety stores). Heck's eventually merged with someone else and lasted into the 80s while Fishman only lasted into the mid-70s.

I'm guessing the Lee stores were basically Newberry/Britt stores with more self-service given the 60K sf size which was close in size to the junior dept stores they had been building. The decor they were using (not sure if it was Lee's or Newberry's) looked very cheap--wallpaper or patterned painting that remined me of the cheap interiors Kroger used for early greenhouse stores. Also interesting is the opening of a "full line" 160K sf Britt's with "name brand" merchandise. I'm guessing that was a one-off and that McCrory didn't continue that program. This was a time when variety stores were no longer being used as junior anchors for malls in major markets, so they probably needed a new direction, although I can't imagine they could have succeeded with full-line department stores---it would have been difficult for a new operation to get prime anchor space and lower end department stores (which I assume this would have been) had been closing since the 50s.

Newberry seemed to benefit from population growth in California, but elsewhere seemed to have clusters of stores mostly in small markets. They had some random urban locations like an isolated store in the Slavic Village area of Cleveland and large downtown stores in a number medium to large cities, but only a few areas where they had many prime suburban locations--mostly in the NYC area, New England and California. They had an odd collection of stores---they bought a maternity clothing chain just as new births were dropping, specialty stores in Canada that weren't profitable. They're Taylor's women's stores used a font very similar to that of the Taylor department stores in Cleveland, an upper middle range chain which closed around the time the clothing stores were opening.
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