Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 5, 1992 TAG: 9201040016
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Sandra Brown Kelly
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
WHAT'S AHEAD FOR HECHT'S
A new year is an opportunity for new beginnings - or endings - and if you hurry you can ring out the old at Thalhimers at Valley View Mall. Next month the store is scheduled to get its new name, Hecht's.May Department Stores Co., the St. Louis parent of both chains, is retiring the Thalhimers name, adding 17 of the chain's 26 stores to its Arlington-based Hecht's operation and selling or closing the rest.
The first visible sign of change comes at 3 p.m. Tuesday when Thalhimers closes its in-store restaurants. The good chicken salad and sinful desserts will be no more at Valley View, River Ridge Mall in Lynchburg and tearooms at other Thalhimers stores.
Jobs going, too
May officials promise a "barely noticeable change for customers" when Thalhimers stores are merged into Hecht's. How true that holds we'll find out later.
For many Thalhimers employees in the Richmond headquarters, however, the change is quite noticeable. Some 600 people are scheduled to lose their jobs, including Brad Barden, a Virginia Tech graduate who heads up the food service operation.
While he's job hunting, Barden is overseeing the closing of the restaurants and the disposal of those sturdy and comfortable tables and chairs, which restaurant workers at Valley View say customers already are asking about buying.
Anyone interested in the furnishings should contact Barden at 804-643-2040.
Except for the tidbit from Barden, though, there's not much official information about Hecht's plans for its Roanoke store.
May is peculiar about who is allowed to give out information and when and what it will reveal. Store managers aren't allowed to talk with reporters.
And Peggy Disney, divisional vice president and director of public relations at Hecht's, said the company didn't have much to say at present.
Disney is a native Washingtonian, and like me, had a grandmother who used to take her downtown Washington to shop at Hecht's.
However, Disney pointed out, the Hecht's of our childhood is not the Hecht's of today. Also, a Hecht's in one city isn't necessarily like the Hecht's in another.
Past moves have paid
May, as does any astute merchant, fits its merchandise to its market. And apparently does it extremely well. Its return on equity over the past five years has averaged 19.5 percent; over the past 12 months, 17.8 percent. These figures put it at the top of the department store groups in a listing reported this month by Forbes magazine's.
A year ago, when May was buying the Thalhimers chain, analyst Lawrence Ring said change in the stores was "inevitable."
Ring said May Co. would run its stores with better cost controls, centralized buying and less local autonomy than had Thalhimers.
Ring, professor and associate dean at the College of William and Mary's business school, predicted it would be at least a year before Thalhimer's shoppers noticed any changes.
The year is up, and here's what appears to be happening:
The restaurants are closing. May stores don't do lunch.
No change is expected in the men's clothing department.
In women's clothing, customers shouldn't expect more upscale fashions than are currently carried by the stores. Roanoke carries fewer of the high fashion lines than would be carried at some Hecht's stores. Don't expect the Ellen Tracy line to return.
In housewares, when some brands are sold out, they won't be reordered. Other brands - possibly lower price ones - will replace them.
There is a May "matrix," a list of preferred suppliers and where the merchandise is sent. Last fall, for instance, some of the higher priced lines in a Winston-Salem, N.C., Thalhimers store were being shipped to the company's Charlotte branch because the Winston store was being downgraded.
May likes to operate with a lean sales staff, but can it can get much leaner? As part of a directive to trim the Thalhimers work force by 3 percent, 12 employees were cut in Roanoke and several in Lynchburg last January. The cutback order came shortly after May Co. paid Carter Hawley Hale Stores Inc. of Los Angeles $317 million - cash - for the Thalhimers chain.
The Thalhimers name, which has been in Virginia for 149 years, officially disappears Jan. 31, but it will stay around on shopping bags and even purchase receipts until supplies are used up, Disney said.
Thalhimers credit cards still are being issued, but sometime in coming weeks - the Thalhimers credit office doesn't know when - customers will get replacement Hecht's cards. Nothing else about charge accounts will be different; the interest rate for Virginia customers will still be 21 percent.
May, which had 1990 net sales of $10 million, has its influence in many states and plans more. In June, the company outlined plans to invest $3.5 billion in the next five years to open 88 department stores and 1,325 Payless ShoeSource stores.
Two of the shoe stores opened in the Roanoke Valley last year.
Department store chains that are part of the May family include some of the famous names - Lord & Taylor based in New York, Kaufmann's of Pittsburgh, Filene's in Boston, Foley's in Houston as well as Hecht's.
If you can't wait until February to sample a Hecht's operation, Disney suggests the closest to what we eventually will have in Roanoke is at Lynnhaven Mall in Virginia Beach. It's a former Miller & Rhoads store, another name from Virginia's retailing past.
Sandra Brown Kelly covers retailing and consumer-related issues for the Roanoke Times & World-News.