Ann & Hope

Ann & Hope Inc.

We discount prices, not quality!
Type	Privately held company
Industry	Retail
Founded	1953
Founder	Marty Chase
Headquarters	1 Ann & Hope Way Cumberland, RI 02864-6918 United States
Number of locations	Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut
Key people	Irwin Chase (President) Fred Looney (CEO)
Owner	Irwin Chase
Website	www.curtainandbathoutlet.com

Ann & Hope is a Rhode Island–based retailer that pioneered practices now common in modern big box stores. Named after the ship Ann and Hope, which was lost at sea off Block Island, Rhode Island in 1806, the store operated from 1953 to 2001 in the Northeastern United States. Currently the company operates a small chain of home fashion outlets, garden outlets, and dollar outlets in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.

Ann & Hope was founded by Martin Chase, who was born in 1906 in Kiev, Ukraine, and moved with his family to Providence, Rhode Island, at age six. He was the only one of six sons not to work in his father's automobile repair business. Instead, when he was 20, he got a job working at a store called Fintex. After Fintex closed its doors in 1929, Chase worked at Howard's Clothes until 1933. Then he started Chase Clothing, where he undersold other area clothing stores by reducing overhead: for example he did not offer alterations and used inexpensive store fixtures.

As World War II approached, the clothing market fell into decline, and Chase began to look for another line of work. In 1946, he purchased the Ann & Hope Mill complex in the village of Lonsdale in Cumberland, Rhode Island. He split the large, empty mill into several small pieces and rented them individually.

Some time before December 1953, one of the tenants left the Mill, leaving a large amount of ribbon behind. Rather than dispose of it, the Chases opened the area to the other employees of the Mill and sold the ribbon. Chase then had the idea to reopen a clothing store in the Mill, initially on the third floor. By the following spring, the operation had become large enough that it was relocated to the ground floor. Over time more products were added, and by 1969, Ann & Hope was a $40 million per year operation.

Ann & Hope was one of the first self-service department stores, in which customers could look at items without sales personnel, and also was one of the first to use shopping carts in a department store. The original mill location also featured a large parking area, which was not common at the time, as well as a basement level with even more merchandise. A special shopping cart conveyor was operated by staff to move store patrons' items from one floor to the other. Other now-familiar features such as having a central checkout area and a liberal store return policy were also pioneered by Ann & Hope.