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Iconic Businesses Long Gone—Part 3
experience financial troubles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Highland filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 1992 and liquidated its last 30 stores in 1993.
Now, this next place that I have been to is Fretter Appliance, which is the same type of business as Highland Appliance. Fretter was founded in 1950 by Oliver "Ollie" Fretter. The company's founder and spokesman, Ollie Fretter, became known in the Detroit area in the 1970s and 1980s via TV commercials in which he promised, "I'll give you five pounds of coffee if I can't beat your best deal. The competition knows me. You should too!" I remember hearing that a lot on television as a youth.
Anyway, Fretter was a major retail seller of home entertainment products,
It is amazing that there are so many businesses whose front doors I have walked through that are no longer around. These are companies I thought were rock solid and would survive the test of time, but companies like Amazon put many places out of business because of the convenience of ordering online. Some places went out of business because someone came along with a better game plan, and people maybe just wanted to try something new.
This first place is Highland Superstores, which I visited in my youth. This was an American consumer electronics and home appliance chain. It was founded in 1933 as Highland Appliance by Harry Mondry in Highland Park, Michigan. By the end of the 1970s, the chain had 18 stores throughout the Midwest, with headquarters in Plymouth, Michigan.
Now, the chain went public in 1985 and had 84 stores, at which point it was the second-largest American electronics retailer behind Circuit City. Despite its number of locations, the chain began to
Article by Michael Joseph Lynch