Corporate Culture
The chain is known for its often self-deprecating humor, both in their advertising and throughout their stores. Their weekly circulars often feature caricatures of founder Jerry Ellis with a number of sarcastic captions, many of which are repeated in their in-store advertising.
Each Building #19 location offers free coffee with "free fake cream." Signs near the free coffee stand warn customers not to make fun of the poor quality of the coffee, because "someday you'll be old and weak too." Their price guarantee awards a bottle of "Chateau du Cheapo" champagne if a competitor beats their price.
Jerry has two daughters (each owns a part of the business) and a son, Bill, who is the president of Building #19.
In 2006, Building #19 put a cartoon in their President's Day advertising flier showing A-shirts labeled as being "Wife-Beater" shirts. Building #19 was criticized and promptly apologized. A flier two years later poked fun at the 2006 controversy and was similarly criticized.
The main Building #19 store is located in Weymouth, Massachusetts; other stores have a fraction appended to their name (such as Building 19½, in Burlington or Building #19¾, in Norwood).
Read more about this topic: Building 19
Famous quotes containing the words corporate and/or culture:
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)