City Wholesale history

MARCUS A. HANNA, ore and shipping magnate and a leading figure in national politics, had his earliest business experience at Hanna, Garretson & Co. (established 1852), wholesale grocers.

The first is that the current Chicago is the second Chicago because it rose Phoenix-like from the Great Fire of 1871.

In 1887, Shedd's division moved into an enormous new Chicago wholesale store, designed by the architect H. H. Richardson and containing about 12 acres of floor space and 1,800 employees.

The city's leading jewel merchant at this time was Henry A. Spaulding, who opened a business in Chicago in 1888.

By 1900, the city boasted 3300 wholesale dealers that generated an annual turnover of $1 billion on selling a large variety of goods.

By 1903, when the company moved into a new 11-story building at the foot of State Street Bridge, it was one of the leading hardware wholesalers in the country, a position it retained through the first half of the twentieth century.

At Marshall Field & Co., as late as 1906, about two-thirds of the annual sales volume of $73 million came from the wholesale department.

In 1915, O. A. Fleming, E. C. Wilson, and Samuel Lux founded the Lux Mercantile Company in Topeka, Kansas, to sell produce to local merchants.

In 1921, Ned Fleming, the son of the company's cofounder, joined the firm.

At John V. Farwell & Co., wholesaling ended even earlier, in 1925.

In 1927, it joined the Independent Grocers Alliance (I.G.A.), a voluntary grocery store chain and one of the largest independent chains today.

In 1935, it acquired the Hutchinson Wholesale Grocery Company, another Kansas-based distributor, the start of a period of growth that has continued virtually unbroken to the present day.

In February 1941 the company changed its name to Fleming Company, Inc.

In 1952, Weideman's was acquired by Consolidated Grocers of Chicago which sold the Edwards division to Food Town.

In 1954, Sol Price, an American entrepreneur, founded FedMart, a discount store that sold own-brand products at a lower price.

In 1956, Fleming Company bought Ray's Printing of Topeka, renamed General Printing and Paper.

Throughout the early 1960s, the company acquired several companies and facilities in the Midwest and Southwest, including the Schumacher Company of Houston, Texas, in 1960.

In 1964, Ned Fleming became chairman of the board of directors and Richard D. Harrison became the company's president.

In 1965, Fleming purchased Thriftway Foods, which operated in the East with headquarters in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

Lastly, the Haserot name disappeared in a 1970 acquisition and merger.

Fleming also branched into health foods distribution when it bought Kahan and Lessin in 1972.

In 1974, Fleming bought Benson Wholesale Company and the Dixieland Food Stores retail chain, both headquartered in Geneva, Alabama.

In 1975, the company pushed into the New Jersey and New York markets by purchasing Royal Food Distributors.

Later, in 1976, he founded Costco, the first wholesale club in the United States, allowing people to buy a wide variety of goods, in large quantities and less costly including products like wholesale bar supplies and alcoholic beverages.

Finally, in 1979 Fleming acquired Blue Ridge Grocery Company of Waynesboro, Virginia, capping off a decade of acquisition and growth.

In March 1981, Richard D. Harrison was elected chairman of the Fleming Companies board of directors, and E. Dean Werries, who had previously headed the Fleming Foods division, replaced him as president, while Harrison remained CEO.

In 1982, it bought the Waples-Platter Company for $91 million, which included the White Swan Foodservice division in Texas.

A month later, in January 1983, it purchased the bankrupt American-Strevell Inc. for $14 million.

In 1984, Fleming acquired United Grocers, a cooperative wholesaler in California.

Also divested were M&H Drugs, the retail drug subsidiary of Malone & Hyde, and White Swan; both were sold in 1988.

Fleming went through a number of significant shifts in the 1990s, starting in 1990 with the loss of a major client when Albertson's became a self-distributing chain.

Early in 1994, Fleming began a major reengineering effort under the guidance of new company president and CEO, Robert E. Stauth.

Nevertheless, the judgment had an immediate impact as Fleming's stock moved down sharply, and the company reduced its dividend for the first quarter of 1996 by 93 percent.

In 2014, only 11.8% of their revenue came from wholesale, but keep in mind that that worked out to one billion dollars.