Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
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in the basement of her husband's second- hand clothing shop. "Her real-short busi- ness philosophy was to sell cheap and tell the truth," said Jeff Lind, the company's chief strategy and development officer. Nebraska Furniture Mart has grown ever larger over the years; today its stores typically comprise a retail showroom and a warehouse-distribution component. The store in the city of The Colony, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, will be not only the company's largest, but also the largest home-furnishings store in the U.S. The combined retail space and ad- jacent distribution facility will approach 2 million square feet in total. Moreover, Nebraska Furniture Mart is pushing things even further with plans to develop a 433-acre mixed-use destination called Grandscape, which will span nearly HeN iN TexaS, Do aS THe Texans do, and in Texas that means do it big. Nebraska Furniture Mart is surely doing it big, and in a big way too. in seeming defiance of the retail industry's general downsizing trend, this omaha, Neb.–based furniture chain is poised to unveil its largest store ever, this spring: a 560,000-square-foot behemoth in the Dallas–Fort Worth metro area. Nebraska Furniture Mart is a mega-format destination retailer that continues to op- erate along the same business model as when Rose Blumkin, a Russian immigrant, founded the company in omaha in 1937, 4 million square feet when fully built out. Besides the furniture store, plans here call for a shopping center, restaurants, and hotel, office and residential space. "our thought on this was to really control our destiny and decide who our neighbors are and make sure that the entire develop- ment lives up to the cleanliness, safety and customer-service goals that we have for Ne- braska Furniture Mart," said Lind. Nebraska Furniture Mart is well known in the Midwest as operator of the flagship 1.7 million-square-foot retail and distribu- tion facility in omaha and a 1 million- square-foot facility in Kansas City. These stores sell not just furnishings, but also appliances, electronics, flooring, bedding and exercise equipment. The company also operates a smaller, 42,000-square- foot appliances and flooring store in Des Moines, iowa. The company employs W one-store mall NEbraska FurNiturE Mart has big plaNs For its MassivE storEs By Beth Mattson-Teig r e t a i l i n g t o d a y 24 S C t / M a r c h 2 0 1 5