ALCO Stores
defunct retail store
ALCO Stores, Inc. (formerly Duckwall-ALCO Stores) was a retail chain operating 198 stores in 23 states, primarily in the United States Midwest. The company was founded in 1901 in Kansas by Alva Lease Duckwall.
It had its headquarters in Coppell, Texas. The company's 352,000-square-foot (32,700 m2) distribution center was located in Abilene, Kansas, where it was previously headquartered.
In October 2014, ALCO filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy; subsequently, the chain was sold to a liquidation firm and closed all of its stores by March 2015.
History
In its early years the company operated five and dime (or "variety") stores called Duckwall's. Duckwall's began their foray into the discount retail business with the opening of the first ALCO store in Clovis, New Mexico, on August 15, 1966. ALCO stores (somewhat smaller than a non-supercenter Walmart) provided the full selection of merchandise offered by the company, as opposed to the five-and-dime store's limitations.
In 1985, after three acquisitions, the company went through a management-led leveraged buy-out.
The public source identifies “ALCO Stores” as defunct retail store. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around ALCO, Stores and defunct.
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This entry incorporates text from “ALCO Stores” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.