Retail History | Tractor Supply — One Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand Dollars on Third Street Northeast
· 1940-1
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Retail History | Tractor Supply — One Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand Dollars on Third Street Northeast
kevin
People treat Tractor Supply as a Brentwood, Tennessee chain that always sold chicken feed, jeans, and a folding wagon to someone who keeps a few acres.
The first book was a catalog of tractor parts.
In 1938 Charles E. Schmidt Sr. of Chicago started Tractor Supply Company as a mail-order shop run from a kitchen table.
Farmers in the northern plains could wait weeks for a dealer part.
A catalog that shipped a gear or a gasket by post cut that wait.
Schmidt then put the catalog behind a counter.
The company timeline dates the first retail store to January 1940 in Minot, North Dakota; local files put the same shop on 509 Third Street Northeast and keep it there until 1966.
That first year the Minot store did $125,000 in 1940 dollars.
Minot sat in the middle of wheat and tractor country, close enough to the catalog's customers that a walk-in counter made sense beside the mailbox.
The company listed over the counter in January 1959 and posted $10 million in annual sales that decade.
The hundredth store opened in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1964.
Headquarters later left Chicago for Nashville in 1979.
The rural-lifestyle assortment came later.
The 1938 idea was narrower: keep a farmer's tractor running without a day-long drive to a dealer warehouse.
The Minot shop has moved three times since Third Street.
A visitor can still stand at 509 Third Street Northeast, kitty-corner from a later convenience store, and see the block that held the first counter.
The national chain still opens stores in farm towns for the same reason Schmidt opened this one.
Photo: public-domain view of Minot, North Dakota, via Wikimedia Commons.
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