Two Guys Department Store, 7300 Ritchie Hwy Feb 1963. How did they come up with that name? Two Guys was an enormously popular discount department store in the Rochester area from the 1960s until the early 1980s. At its peak, the retailer had 60 stores. The sprawling stores were called one of the oldest discount chains in the country.” You could buy everything from clothing to hardware to sporting goods to furniture to appliances at Two Guys. Some stores originally sold groceries, too. Two Guys was founded by Herbert and Sidney Hubschman of Harrison, N.J. The brothers got their start in business selling mildly scratched TVs with low mark-up costs, before opening their first store in 1946 above an empty diner. Their business took off, and their reputations grew. Other local appliance dealers, infuriated by their prices, began calling the Hubschmans those two bastards from Harrison, according to the book The Glory Days of Buffalo Shopping, by Michael F. Rizzo. From that derisive moniker, a company name was born. They decided to taunt their competitors and call their business, The Two Bastards from Harrison, This move failed, as no newspaper would accept their ad. The name was changed to Two Guys from Harrison, and the ads ran. The name was later shortened to just Two Guys, and thats how it was known when the first store opened in the 1960s. Most of the Two Guys stores were in upstate New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and parts of New England. Bernie Marcus, one of the founders of Home Depot, got his retail start at Two Guys. A profile of Marcus in the American National Business Hall of Fame notes those origins. Two Guys was an East Coast retailing star in those days, it dominated such product categories as appliances, fans and lawn furniture. It was to a large degree a forerunner of the superstores created decades later by Wal-Mart. The Two Guys jingle was We save money for you at Two Guys…Naturally! Two Guys became one of the most popular local retailers in a field that included contemporaries such as J.M. Fields, Shoppers Fair, and, later, Gold Circle and Kmart. By the end of 1964, the Hubschman brothers were no longer part of the Two Guys organization, Herb Hubschman died that year, and Sidney resigned the previous year. Two Guys continued to thrive for years. By the early 1980s, though, sales were declining and the end was near. The Glen Burnie Two Guys close in February 1982. The parent company, Vornado Inc., got out of retailing the following year due to a $20.5 million loss in the fiscal quarter Oct 1981.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 11:10:14 +0000