Kohl's
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Template:Infobox Company | company_slogan = "Expect Great Things" | foundation = 1962 | location = Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin | industry = Retail | products = Clothing, footwear, bedding, furniture, jewelry, beauty products, electronics, and housewares. | homepage = http://www.kohls.com/ | }}
Kohl's Corporation (Template:NYSE) is a department store chain headquartered in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. It was started by Max Kohl in 1962. The stores sell a variety of goods, such as apparel, shoes and accessories for women, children and men, plus home products like small electronics, bedding, luggage, and more. The store aims at the middle and upper-middle class, and are located in many enclosed shopping malls. However, newer stores are usually built in smaller shopping centers around larger, enclosed ones; some of its stores in Texas are located far away from traditional malls. The store is considered to be a step above chains like Wal-Mart, Target, and Kmart but not quite as classy as Sears, J.C. Penney, Macy's, or Dillard's.
Kohl's features virtually the same merchandise mix as traditional department stores. However, its operations differ considerably from that model. The most noticeable distinction between Kohl's and traditional department stores is that all Kohl's stores have centralized checkout aisles, unlike the traditional setup of separate checkout counters in each major department. This has led many observers to consider Kohl's a hybrid of a department store and a mass merchandiser.
There are about 700 Kohl's stores in 38 states in the United States. The chain's expansion has mainly focused on the middle of the country; however, they recently expanded into the Rochester, New York and Buffalo, New York markets. As of April, 2005, the Company is opening stores in Florida and other Southern states.
The company has had a world wide web presence since 1998 [1], and offered on-line shopping since the year 2000. The company entered the S&P 500 list in 1998, and is also listed in the Fortune 500.
History
Max Kohl built a grocery store in 1946, the first in what would become a southeastern Wisconsin chain known as Kohl's Food Stores. [2] In 1962, he started the first department store, also called Kohl's.
In 1972 the British-American Tobacco Company, then known as Brown and Williamson Tobacco, bought the department stores and food stores. The Kohl family, led by Herb and Allen Kohl, stayed on to manage the company. The family left the management in 1979, and Herb Kohl went on to become a United States Senator and owner of the Milwaukee Bucks. This firm expanded Kohl's presence from 10 to 39 stores in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.
The grocery stores were sold to A&P in 1983. The last grocery stores closed in 2003.
A group of investors, including the senior management, purchased the company in 1986, and the company added 27 more stores in the next two years. In 1992, the company went public, and a period of expansion began. Kohl's entered mid-Atlantic markets in 1997 (opening in many former locations of Clover (an offshoot of the Strawbridge's corporation) brand department stores in the Philadelphia region); Texas and Missouri in 1999; Georgia and the Southeast in 2001; New England in 2002; California and the Southwest in 2003; and the Northwest in 2006.