Retail History | AutoZone — Three Hundred Dollars on a Forrest City Fourth
· 1979-7
Unreviewed contributionBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Retail History | AutoZone — Three Hundred Dollars on a Forrest City Fourth
kevin
People treat AutoZone as a Memphis tower that always sold Duralast from a red-and-orange box.
The first store was an Auto Shack on Crowley's Ridge.
On 4 July 1979 J. R. Pitt Hyde III, president of the Memphis grocer Malone and Hyde, opened the first unit in Forrest City, Arkansas.
Sales that day totaled about three hundred dollars.
Hyde had joined the Walmart board in 1978 and borrowed the grocery habit of wide aisles, bright light, uniformed clerks and everyday low prices.
The Federal Trade Commission had already blocked several food-distributor acquisitions, so the family wholesale house needed a second book.
Doc Crain managed the first floor. The slogan he later coined, WITTDTJR, meant sell what it takes to do the job right and nothing extra.
By 1981 an Express Parts warehouse in Memphis let a small-town counter special-order parts the shelves could not hold.
The hundredth store opened in 1983.
Radio Shack sued over the name. Auto Shack became AutoZone in 1987.
Hyde spun the chain off before selling Malone and Hyde to Fleming Companies in 1988, and kept the parts book in Memphis.
Headquarters remain on the bluff. The mechanism that survived is the grocery one: treat a hard part like a staple, stock it by the cars that actually drive the zip code, and price it every day.
Photo: Memphis riverfront used here as the later headquarters city; the first register rang in Forrest City, via Wikimedia Commons.
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