Polk Brothers was a large

home appliance A home appliance, also referred to as a domestic appliance, an electric appliance or a household appliance, is a machine which assists in household functions such as cooking, cleaning and food preservation. The domestic application attached to ...

and

electronics Electronics is a scientific and engineering discipline that studies and applies the principles of physics to design, create, and operate devices that manipulate electrons and other Electric charge, electrically charged particles. It is a subfield ...

retailer Retail is the sale of goods and services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is the sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturers, directly or through a wholesal ...

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that had 17 stores in the region at its peak in the 1980s. Polk Bros. was the dominating electronics/appliance retailer in the Chicago market through the 1980s. The chain was known for its aggressive "let's make a deal" salesmen who would pair off with customers as they came in the door. It was an industry leader in innovative merchandising and was chosen to be the first retailer in the nation to sell color televisions and

microwave ovens A microwave oven, or simply microwave, is an electric oven that heats and cooks food by exposing it to electromagnetic radiation in the microwave frequency range. This induces Dipole#Molecular dipoles, polar molecules in the food to rotate and ...

History

Early history

One of the original discounters, Polk Bros. Inc. was founded by Sol Polk, the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants, The Jewish List: Chicago's Top 100 Jews of the 20th Century
, Nr. 28 on the Northwest Side in the Portage Park community area of

in 1935. The first outlet was on Central Avenue under the name Central Appliance and Furniture at 3334 N. Central Avenue. Brothers Sol, Sam, Harry, David and Morris and their sister, Ghisella "Goldie" Bachmann, ran the business, which was renamed Polk Brothers in 1946. By the 1960s, there were two dozen or more family members including uncles, cousins, and in-laws, working in various departments of the company, which became one of the biggest appliance retailers in the

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at a time when the industry was very fragmented. In the 1950s and 1960s, when most appliances and stereos were bought at

department stores A department store is a retail establishment offering a wide range of consumer goods in different areas of the store under one roof, each area ("department") specializing in a product category. In modern major cities, the department store made ...

at full price, Polk Bros. pioneered the art of discounting. "The motto was that no customer walks out of the store without buying at least something," recalls Howard Polk. "Whatever it took to make a deal, we gave it to them." The company's influence lives on at

Wal-Mart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores in the United States and 23 other ...

and other chains that advertise, as Polk Bros. did, the lowest prices anywhere. Owner Sol Polk was considered a master pitchman. He ran in-store promotions that offered everything from TVs to

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trees. Polk served as the president of the North American Retail Dealers Association (NARDA), and his innovative and flamboyant promotions of the industry's products gained him nationwide recognition. He also was frequently called on to appear at hearings on proposed industry-related legislative and regulatory hearings held by the

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and federal and state agencies.

Decline and bankruptcy

A fire during the evening of June 1, 1987 that gutted the company's warehouse and adjacent headquarters at 8311 W. North Avenue in Melrose Park put the company in financial straits, and the death a year later of 71-year-old

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Sol Polk sent it spiraling downward. The 1990-91 recession and the arrival of new competitors such as

Best Buy Best Buy Co., Inc. is an American multinational consumer electronics retailer headquartered in Richfield, Minnesota. Originally founded by Richard M. Schulze and James Wheeler in 1966 as an audio specialty store called Sound of Music, it was r ...

sealed Polk Bros.' fate. The chain officially closed its doors on July 8, 1992, in a grand "going out of business" sale. A Menards occupied the rebuilt Polk Brothers store in Melrose Park until the mid-2010s when it moved out of that store to build a store of its own further west on North Avenue just east of the now-demolished

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plant.

Polk Bros. Foundation

The company's assets were rolled over into the Polk Bros. Foundation, today one of the Chicago area's largest charitable organizations. With assets of $385 million, the foundation in one year dispensed 350

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totaling $15.7 million to organizations. The foundation has funded organizations such as the Chicago Children's Choir, The Chicago High School for the Arts (ChiArts), and the University of Chicago. The Polks also had a vast

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that included

stock Stocks (also capital stock, or sometimes interchangeably, shares) consist of all the Share (finance), shares by which ownership of a corporation or company is divided. A single share of the stock means fractional ownership of the corporatio ...

in such bygone Chicago retailers as Wieboldt's and Goldblatt's. They also held thousands of acres of real estate around the country, most of it divested over the past 15 years. One of the last parcels, prime in the Malibu Hills north of

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

, has a sale pending.{{when, date=April 2019

References

External links

Polk Bros. Foundation
Retail companies established in 1935 Defunct companies based in Chicago Defunct consumer electronics retailers of the United States Defunct retail companies of the United States Defunct companies based in Illinois 1935 establishments in Illinois Retail companies disestablished in 1992 1992 disestablishments in Illinois