Retail History | O'Reilly — Thirteen Employees at 403 Sherman
· 1957-12
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Retail History | O'Reilly — Thirteen Employees at 403 Sherman
kevin
People treat O'Reilly Auto Parts as a national chain run from a Springfield campus that was always that large.
The first store was a single counter with thirteen people.
Charles F. O'Reilly, seventy-two, and his son Charles H. "Chub" O'Reilly had built Link Motor Supply into the dominant jobber in southwest Missouri. In 1957 Link planned to retire the father and move the son to Kansas City.
They declined and opened O'Reilly Automotive on 2 December 1957 at 403 Sherman in Springfield. Thirteen employees, several of them stockholder-workers, staffed the room.
Sales in 1958, the first full year, were 700,000 dollars. By 1961 combined volume with the Ozark Automotive Distributors jobber book reached 1.3 million dollars.
A second Springfield store opened at Glenstone and Bennett in July 1965. In March 1975 annual sales were 7 million dollars, and a 52,000-square-foot warehouse rose at 233 South Patterson.
The mechanism was employee ownership inside a parts counter. The founders kept the people who already knew the stock, then used that same promote-from-within bench to open the next town rather than sell the book to a consolidator.
403 Sherman no longer trades as store one. The pilgrimage site is the original Sherman Avenue block in Springfield, where the family chose a new name instead of a transfer to Kansas City.
Photo: Springfield, Missouri files, via Wikimedia Commons
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