Tuesday, February 24, 2004
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- On the second floor of a chilly Pittsburgh warehouse, a guy in a black knit cap and flannel shirt sits listening to a radio and sorting store hangers. The white ones there, the clip-on styles over there and so on. It's going to take awhile.
Used Store Fixtures owner Dale Middleman last year agreed to take 3 million hangers from retailers who didn't need them anymore. He'll sell them to other businesses or individuals who could use them. It's what he does -- buying or simply taking corporate America's discards and reselling them to those who have a use for them.
Even the outlet looks like a remnant of Pittsburgh's economic past, with its painted sign on the outside of its old five-story brick home on the Boulevard of the Allies, formerly a warehouse for the defunct Frank & amp; Seder's. Inside, it's a virtual Who's Who of businesses past, some not so long ago.
Stacked near the first-floor cash register, for example, are cardboard boxes, priced at $15 apiece, that each hold 500 bags made for the erstwhile Carnegie-based National Record Mart chain.
A clothing rack is hung with a pink garment bag from William Penn Hat and Gown and a white one, from Adeles, defunct stores in the city's Shadyside and Squirrel Hill sections that dressed women for years.
And in the unheated upper floors are rows of red plastic shopping carts still bearing the name of Hills department stores, R.I.P. 1999.
New life from death
"I'm a mortician on one hand and an obstetrician on the other," owner Middleman likes to say, when asked to explain what he has been doing for the past 20 years.
The mortician side buys old jewelry counters, grocery store meat slicers, food court tables, refrigerators, salt shakers, napkin holders, dressing room mirrors and just about anything else used in a retail operation.
Fixtures aren't always from bankrupt or closed stores -- malls that remodel and stores that freshen up also sell their used stuff to liquidators such as Middleman.
The obstetrician side of the business helps give birth to new retail operations, typically small stores opened by entrepreneurs or locations set up by discount chains.
The warehouse serves as a source of equipment, supplies and furnishings at prices well below what they would have to pay if they were buying these items new.
Though the past few years' rash of store closings may seem to be the best thing for his business, it doesn't work if both sides aren't active. Used Store Fixtures probably had its worst years in 2001 and 2002, when sales fell as much as 35 percent to 40 percent. But things surged almost that much in 2003, Middleman said.
Improvements
In part, the turnaround came because more people seemed willing to take risks last year, he said. The company also started picking up more work through a network of liquidators that came together a couple of years ago.
Used Store Fixtures now hears about deals through peers in Ohio, Virginia, Michigan, Maryland and even a guy out on the West Coast. Middleman has a stack of mannequins, for example, that he shared with a liquidator in the Philadelphia area.
Much of the stuff never makes it to the 100,000-square-foot warehouse, which is open to the public daily and Saturday. If Used Store Fixtures can act as a broker, finding items a retailer needs and having them shipped directly from the source, that's more profitable.
Middleman, whose name obviously fits what he does, works his retail contacts, checks his e-mail and stays on the phone so much that his brother-in-law thinks he should get one implanted.
"It's supply and demand," he said. "It's being in the right place at the right time."