Mervyns History

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The Company Description of Its Time

This page is kept as a historical profile. On October 17, 2008, the company announced that it would liquidate its assets through a Chapter 7 filing. Mervyn's was an American middle-scale department store chain based in Hayward, California, founded by Mervin G. Morris in 1949. It carried national brands of clothing, footwear, bedding, furniture, jewelry, beauty products, electronics and housewares, and many of its stores stood in shopping malls. Middle-scale is the honest positioning word in that summary: neither discount warehouse nor luxury flagship, but the family store in between, and the merchandise list, soft home goods beside apparel beside electronics, is the classic full-line assortment of that tier.

California Growth and the Dayton Hudson Years

The expansion ledger is unusually specific. By mid-1975 Mervyn's operated stores across California in places including Alameda, Antioch, Campbell, Citrus Heights, Cupertino, Daly City, Dublin, Fremont, Merced, Millbrae, Modesto, Mountain View, Napa, Oakland, Petaluma, Sacramento, Salinas, San Jose, San Lorenzo, San Pablo, Vallejo and Visalia. In October 1975 the chain expanded into southern California, opening in Fullerton and Huntington Beach. By 1978 it had grown to more than 50 stores in three states, and Mervyn's was acquired by the Dayton Hudson Corporation, now Target Corporation, keeping its separate identity as a Dayton Hudson subsidiary.

From 1995 to 2001 the stores were rebranded as Mervyn's California, an effort, the record says, to identify with its West Coast roots, a regional name worn proudly rather than hidden as the chain's centre of gravity stayed western. In March 2004 Target announced plans to put the Mervyn's and Marshall Field's divisions up for sale in order to focus on Target stores, and in July 2004 Mervyn's was sold to a group of investors including private investment firm and turnaround specialist Sun Capital Partners, Cerberus Capital Management, and real estate investment company Lubert-Adler Management. Based on 2005 revenue, the filing notes, Mervyn's was the eighty-third largest retailer in the United States.

Contraction, Liquidation, and the Name After 2008

The final numbers descend in order. In 2006 Mervyn's had 189 stores in 10 states. One year later the count had reduced to 177 stores in 7 states. On October 17, 2008 came the announcement kept at the head of the historical record page: the company would liquidate its assets through a Chapter 7 filing, and all remaining locations were closed by December 31 of that year. Chapter 7, a liquidation rather than a reorganisation, is why this profile is written entirely in the past tense; there was no emergence, no surviving store group, and no successor chain trading under the fascia.

One postscript is recorded. The Morris family, having bought back the intellectual property rights to the company in 2009, announced plans to relaunch as an internet-based enterprise. That sentence is filed exactly as stated, a plan announced by the founding family for the name they created in 1949, and this profile does not extend it into claims about later trading. Apparel Search keeps profiles of closed retailers as dated history by standing policy, removing such companies from current shopping listings while preserving their records, and Mervyns, sixty years from founding to liquidation, is kept here with its store counts, owners and closing dates intact.

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