History
Office Depot was founded in March 1986 by the late F. Patrick Sher, the former chairman and chief executive officer, Dougherty, president, and Jack Kopkin, executive vice president. All were formerly associated with Home-owner's Warehouse, the home improvement company that Sher sold to Service Merchandise in 1983 and renamed Mr. HOW Warehouse. The catalog showroom chain eventually sold off the Mr. HOW units to a variety of buyers, including Builders Square, the home center warehouse subsidiary of Kmart Corp. They envisioned a warehouse-style store for office products where customers could purchase items in bulk for discounted prices. This concept led to starting Office Depot, and the company opened its first store at Lakes Mall in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida in October 1986. The company saw steady growth throughout the years, and opened the 1000th Office Depot North American retail store in Countryside, Illinois in 2005.
Read more about this topic: Office Depot
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)