An outlet store or factory outlet is a brick and mortar or online retail store in which manufacturers sell their stock directly to the public. Traditionally, a factory outlet was a store attached to a factory or warehouse, sometimes allowing customers to watch the production process like in the original L.L. Bean store. In modern usage, outlet stores are typically manufacturer-branded stores like Gap grouped together in outlet malls. The invention of the factory outlet store is often credited to Harold Alfond, founder of the Dexter Shoe Company.
Read more about Outlet Store: History, Demographics
Famous quotes containing the words outlet and/or store:
“A lock-jaw that bends a man’s head back to his heels, hydrophobia, that makes him bark at his wife and babes, insanity, that makes him eat grass; war, plague; cholera, famine, indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don’t mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that’s the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)