Fred Meyer
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| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Retail |
| Headquarters | Portland, Oregon |
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Area served
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Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska |
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Key people
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Jeff Burt, president |
| Parent | Kroger |
| Website | fredmeyer.com |
Fred Meyer, Inc., is a chain of superstores founded in 1922 in Portland, Oregon, by Fred G. Meyer (not to be confused with Frederik Gerhard Hendrik Meijer, former chairman of the Meijer superstore chain, which is based in Michigan, with stores in the Midwest). The company was one of the pioneers of one-stop shopping, eventually combining a complete grocery supermarket with a drugstore, clothing store, shoe store, fine jewelers, home decor store, home improvement center, garden center, electronics store, toy store, sporting goods store, and more under one roof.
Fred Meyer stores are located in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska. Before the company's merger with Kroger in October 1998, it traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol FMY. Although the company is now an entity of Kroger, the stores are still branded Fred Meyer, and the western region of The Kroger Company is headquartered in Portland.
Fred G. Meyer, originally of Brooklyn, New York, opened his first stand on the corner of a busy highway in Brooklyn selling cherries. Meyer said he originally started his cherry selling business, because he "needed the extra cash to buy a car." Meyer eventually expanded his store to selling items for cleaning, as well as cereal, until he eventually opened his first permanent location in Portland, Oregon.
The first suburban one-stop shopping center opened in 1931 in the Hollywood District of Portland, a neighborhood he deliberately chose through a shrewd and prescient application of market research: he would pay customers' overtime parking tickets that they incurred while shopping at his downtown store, just to obtain their home addresses. The store's innovations included a grocery store alongside a drugstore plus home products, off-street parking, gas station, and — eventually — clothing. Fred G. Meyer would base store locations on planned highway construction.
In 1951, the Fred Meyer Company built a large warehouse near Providence Portland Medical Center in Laurelhurst, despite complaints and controversy from neighbors and the city council. Neighbors didn't want large truck volume in their city, but the area was already zoned for industrial and commercial east of 44th Avenue. The huge warehouse was built to the detriment of the Banfield Expressway, built in Sullivan's Gulch less than five years later. The warehouse had to be condemned and partially destroyed for the freeway, with the state highway commission selling the remaining sections to the Bemis Company. The Fred Meyer Company moved to Swan Island on land formerly occupied by wartime housing for Kaiser Shipyards.
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Wikipedia