Interstate Department Stores
American holding company
Interstate Department Stores, Inc., was an American holding company for a chain of small department stores, founded in Delaware in 1928. After a very rapid expansion as the result of acquisition and expansion of two discount store chains acquired in 1959 and 1960 and also two toy store chains acquired in 1967 and 1969, the firm was renamed in 1970 as Interstate Stores, Inc., to better reflect its business. Increased competition and the changes in consumer buying habits eventually led to decreased sales in the late 1960s and early 1970s which forced the firm to file for bankruptcy in 1974. After shedding all of its non-performing units, the firm was able to exit bankruptcy with the entire toy division intact along with a small remnant of the department store division in 1978. The firm was renamed Toys "R" Us upon emergence from bankruptcy.
History
Interstate Department Stores was incorporated in Delaware on February 14, 1928, as a holding company to operate twenty-three department stores in the states of Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, New York, Ohio, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and West Virginia. The first stores were obtained by combining the properties associated with the Federman Department Stores and Stillman Department Stores groups. During this process, individual stores kept their individual names, and local management and staff. Leo G. Federman was selected as the company's first president. The oldest store had been in operations for 20 years.
The public source identifies “Interstate Department Stores” as american holding company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Interstate, Department and Stores.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q16997220. The first chronological checks are 1928, 1959, 1960 and 1967.
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This entry incorporates text from “Interstate Department 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.