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Belk department stores

Posted: 11 Sep 2008 10:31
by ajsanjua
I was wondering on how the hyphenated name system of Belk in past eras worked. Were the groups "Belk-XXXX" co-owners of Belk stores in a particular geographic region, being as local retailers or were they like investment groups? I know that Belk eventually abolished the system by 1998, but are the business alliances still there, or are all Belk stores fully company-owned?

How many of these Belk business partnerships were/are there?

Re: Belk department stores

Posted: 11 Sep 2008 19:15
by Dave
ajsanjua wrote:I was wondering on how the hyphenated name system of Belk in past eras worked. Were the groups "Belk-XXXX" co-owners of Belk stores in a particular geographic region, being as local retailers or were they like investment groups? I know that Belk eventually abolished the system by 1998, but are the business alliances still there, or are all Belk stores fully company-owned?

How many of these Belk business partnerships were/are there?
Belk held almost every single store in separate entities, and the entities had differing percentages of ownership by members of the family. I don't know if they still do that or not. So, yeah, I guess you could liken them to investment groups - but the groups were fractured even under Belk and the "hyphenated" Belks. There were a ton of them.

Re: Belk department stores

Posted: 11 Sep 2008 19:22
by Dave
Belk actually has a fairly comprehensive history available on their website that explains all of this:
http://www.belk.com/AST/Misc/Belk_Store ... istory.jsp

I note that when they did consolidate, they didn't have as many entities as they once had had - but it was still over 100,

Re: Belk department stores

Posted: 11 Sep 2008 22:00
by Groceteria
For those of you who care, Kinko's was organized in much the same way until the late 1990s. In fact, I vaguely remember the same investment firm handled the Kinko's roll-up being involved when Belk did so as well, but I'm not 100% sure about that.

Re: Belk department stores

Posted: 15 Sep 2008 05:13
by ajsanjua
Dave wrote:Belk actually has a fairly comprehensive history available on their website that explains all of this:
http://www.belk.com/AST/Misc/Belk_Store ... istory.jsp

I note that when they did consolidate, they didn't have as many entities as they once had had - but it was still over 100,
Thanks for the corporate history link! It is always fascinating to learn about companies in this thorough sense though Wikipedia often does a OK job for the basics.