Rose Blumkin, Retail Queen, Dies at 104
Rose Blumkin, who founded the Nebraska Furniture Mart in 1937, helped her son and grandchildren build it into the nation's largest home furnishings store and continued selling carpet there well past her 100th birthday, died on Friday in Omaha. She was 104.
Mrs. B, as she was fondly known by Midwesterners who often traveled hundreds of miles to Omaha to shop at the store, was known for her credo: ''Sell cheap, tell the truth, don't cheat nobody.'' In her last years, she moved around the cavernous store on a golf cart, sometimes startling visitors by abruptly zipping away toward customers who appeared to be waiting for attention.
Mrs. Blumkin stood just 4 feet 10 inches in her prime, but her merchandising skills and daring as she made the long journey from an impoverished childhood in Russia to success led figures like Warren E. Buffett to rank her as a business giant. At one point soon after founding her store, she sold every appliance and piece of furniture in her home to pay off a debt. When furniture manufacturers stopped selling directly to her after bigger customers in Omaha complained about her low retail prices, she traveled to Kansas City, Mo., Chicago and New York, bought from department stores and still undersold her rivals.
''Put her up against the top graduates of the top business schools or chief executives of the Fortune 500 and, assuming an even start with the same resources, she'd run rings around them,'' Mr. Buffett said in 1984 soon after Berkshire Hathaway Inc. bought majority control of the Furniture Mart from Mrs. Blumkin. Based on his experience as a customer and as an acquaintance of her children, Mr. Buffett made the acquisition on a handshake without bothering to audit her books or inventory.
Mrs. Blumkin was born Dec. 3, 1893, in Schidrin, a village near Minsk, one of eight children of Solomon and Chasia Gorelick. Her father was a rabbi, and her mother ran a grocery store to support the struggling family, which lived in a two-room log cabin and slept on straw mattresses. In interviews, Mrs. Blumkin recalled working in the store at age 6, talking her way into a job as a store clerk when she was 13 and becoming manager with six men working under her three years later.
Mrs. Blumkin was 20 when she married Isadore Blumkin, a shoe salesman, soon before he fled to the United States to avoid being drafted into the Russian Army. Although unable to speak English, Mrs. Blumkin managed to rejoin him in Fort Dodge, Iowa, three years later, and the young couple moved to Omaha in 1919, where Mr. Blumkin opened a secondhand clothing store.
The Blumkins had four children by the time the Depression struck. Mrs. Blumkin encouraged her husband to cut prices, helped him branch into new products and dreamed up innovative advertising. She started her own furniture business with $500 she borrowed from a brother.
Mrs. Blumkin's own nominee for the nation's greatest businessman was her son, Louis, who became her major ally in running the Furniture Mart after returning from military service in World War II. Like her, he typically put in seven-day, 70-hour workweeks. But she began to feel frozen out of decisions as her grandchildren, Irving and Ronald Blumkin, became more involved in the 1980's. She bitterly ''retired'' in 1989 at the age of 95, but after three months returned with characteristic combativeness, setting up a rival store called Mrs. B's Clearance and Factory Outlet across the street from the Furniture Mart. By 1991, it had become profitable and was Omaha's third-largest carpet outlet.
The family eventually repaired the rift, and Mr. Buffett acquired the new venture in 1992, merging it into the Furniture Mart. He later joked with reporters that it had been a mistake he would never repeat to let Mrs. Blumkin retire without signing an agreement not to compete.
Mrs. Blumkin's husband died in 1950. She is survived by her son, Louis; three daughters, Frances Batt, Cynthia Schneider and Sylvia Cohn; two sisters, Anne Rosenblatt and Ruth Lasher, all of Omaha; a brother, Mayer Gorelick of Los Angeles; 12 grandchildren, and 21 great-grandchildren.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 13, 1998, Section D, Page 19 of the National edition with the headline: Rose Blumkin, Retail Queen, Dies at 104.
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/13/business/rose-blumkin-retail-queen-dies-at-104.html
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