Nebraska Furniture Mart's Kansas Store To Surp

Omaha, NE, January 15, 2007--Nebraska Furniture Mart has been building its sales for 70 years, steadily increasing the goods flowing through its giant Omaha store and warehouse complex, according to the Omaha World-Herald. But according to one highly placed source, in 2007 the retailer's hometown store will finish second to its Kansas City, Kansas, cousin, which is due to ring up more than $400 million in only its fourth full year. That source is Warren Buffett, chairman of the Furniture Mart's parent company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., and an unabashed promoter of the Mart's collection of appliances, floor coverings, electronics and, of course, furniture. Going from zero to $400 million is even faster than the acceleration at the Kansas Speedway, a neighbor of the Furniture Mart's store. It's no coincidence that a racing giant and some retail giants are within sight of each other. "Location, location, location," said Robert Batt, a Mart executive and grandson of the store's founder, the late Rose Blumkin. The right spot is a good start, Batt said. Growing to $400-plus million in sales also follows what he said was a campaign to unlock the Kansas City market's pent-up demand by creating excitement among potential customers. In the late 1990s the Blumkin family began looking for an 80-acre Kansas City site with good traffic access. Folks from northwest Missouri and northeast Kansas were regular customers of the Omaha store. Research revealed a Mart-sized hole among Kansas City retailers. The Kansas City area, which has 1.8 million inhabitants, seemed the perfect place for an expansion, close enough for management oversight and within driving distance of the Mart's Omaha warehouses. By happy coincidence, officials in Kansas City, Kansas, were putting together tax incentives and other benefits to revitalize languishing Wyandotte County, which for decades was an unremarkable K.C. suburb. The NASCAR speedway was a major component, but the plan's backers also wanted retail magnets and other attractions to draw people regularly to the new tourism district surrounding the speedway. As mayor of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County, Carol Marinovich worked to organize the tourism district and attract the speedway. She came to the Mart's Omaha store and met with Batt and executives Ron and Irv Blumkin. "I still recall walking out of that meeting with Irv and Ron and Bob, and thinking, 'I like them. This is a good fit,'" she said. The Furniture Mart joined Cabela's, the Nebraska-based outdoor sports retailer, as the major retail anchors for what is now the Village West area. Marinovich said the project "is everything I hoped it would be. The quality of the development, the number of cars in the parking lot. I never doubted it would be successful." The Village West's success as a destination for the region's shoppers has attracted new housing to the area and another mixed-use development nearby with a Schlitterbahn Waterpark. Marinovich, who recently joined a Kansas City, Missouri, public relations firm, said she was the store's first customer, when she bought a living room set. She said she has been a regular buyer since then--a 50-inch TV, a small flat-screen TV for her kitchen, a computer, at least three cameras, a microwave, a vacuum cleaner and, this Christmas, a massage table. "It's pretty phenomenal what has happened as a result of that development," Marinovich said. "The image of the community has improved, and it's become a destination." The Furniture Mart and Cabela's, she said, "played a big part in it." Cabela's opened in the summer of 2002 and, a year later, the Mart opened its 450,000-square-foot retail store, about half the size of the entire Westroads Mall in Omaha.

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