Retail History | Genuine Parts — Forty Thousand Dollars for Six People in Atlanta
· 1928-5
Unreviewed contributionBy kevin · · Report an issue
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Retail History | Genuine Parts — Forty Thousand Dollars for Six People in Atlanta
kevin
People treat Genuine Parts as an Atlanta holding company that always owned NAPA signs on independent jobber stores.
The first book was one auto-parts counter.
On 7 May 1928 Carlyle Fraser, with William Martin, bought Motor Parts Depot in Atlanta for $40,000 in 1928 dollars and renamed it Genuine Parts Company.
The shop opened with six employees.
First-year sales were $75,000 in 1928 dollars; the store still lost about $2,500 after start-up costs.
The previous owner had warned that the automobile business had already peaked.
Fraser had helped organize the National Automotive Parts Association in 1925.
NAPA was a cooperative that set standards and moved parts from manufacturers to jobbers so a repair shop in a small town could order a bearing without keeping a factory warehouse.
Genuine Parts used that network from the first year: buy at warehouse scale, deliver faster than the dealer next door, and keep the independent storefront alive.
Depression traffic helped more than it hurt.
Cars stayed on the road longer, and replacement parts outlasted new-car showrooms.
By 1948, the firm's twentieth year, sales had reached $20 million in 1948 dollars and the company sold 150,000 common shares at $11 a share.
NAPA-branded parts arrived in 1966.
The headquarters later left downtown for Cobb County and then Wildwood.
The mechanism never changed much: a warehouse between the factory and the bay, stocked deep enough that a Saturday repair does not wait until Monday.
A visitor in downtown Atlanta is standing near the trade that Fraser bought, not at a marked 1928 storefront.
The six-person shop is gone.
The distribution idea is not.
Photo: Atlanta skyline from the Jackson Street Bridge, Wikimedia Commons.
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