Gary Hoover
| Gary Hoover | |
|---|---|
| Born |
March 19, 1951 Lafayette, Indiana, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago |
| Occupation |
Chairman & CEO at Bigwig Games |
Gary Hoover (born March 19, 1951) is an American businessperson who founded Bookstop, an American bookstore chain, and The Reference Press, which became Hoover's business information company. He is the CEO of Bigwig Games and entrepreneur-in-residence at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information.
Hoover was born in Lafayette, Indiana, the third of the three children of entrepreneur Wilbur C. and substitute school teacher Judith. He grew up in Anderson, Indiana, a General Motors factory town, graduating from Madison Heights High School in 1969.
As a child, Hoover displayed an interest in business. He invented business games to play with friends. At the age of 12 in a quest to better understand General Motors he discovered and subscribed to Fortune Magazine.
In 1969, Hoover entered the University of Chicago. There, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics. Four of his teachers, including Milton Friedman, later won Nobel Prizes.
After graduating from college, Hoover spent two years as a security analyst at Citibank, New York, covering the retailing industry, followed by two years as a buyer for Sanger-Harris, the Dallas division of Federated Department Stores. In 1977 he joined the May Department Stores Company in St. Louis, where he spent five years in tasks ranging from financial analysis and planning to shopping center development and marketing.
In 1982, Hoover moved to Austin, Texas, after selecting it as the first city to launch his idea, Bookstop, the book superstore. Over seven years he and his colleagues developed the first chain of book superstores. In 1989 Bookstop was the United States's fourth-largest bookstore chain, with a total of 22 stores in four U.S. states. Laura Elder of the Houston Business Journal wrote that the chain "pioneered the superstore concept". Hoover himself states that "While the execution of the idea was difficult and complex, the core idea was not. We simply took the retail business model of Toys R Us — giant single-category stores with large product selections and low prices — and applied it to books." Bookstop sold to Barnes & Noble for $41.5 million in 1989.
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