Roses Stores is a regional discount store

Discount store

A discount store is a type of department store, which sells products at prices lower than those asked by traditional retail outlets. Most discount department stores offer a wide assortment of goods; others specialize in such merchandise as jewelry, electronic equipment, or electrical appliances...

 with its headquarters in Henderson, North Carolina

Henderson, North Carolina

Henderson, with a population of 16,095 at the 2000 census, is the county seat of Vance County, North Carolina, United States.The city was named in honor of former North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Leonard Henderson, who lived nearby and was a friend of early settler Lewis Reavis...

. Once dominant in the mountainous regions and rural areas of North Carolina

North Carolina

North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...

, South Carolina

South Carolina

South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...

, Georgia

Georgia (U.S. state)

Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...

, Kentucky

Kentucky

The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...

, Tennessee

Tennessee

Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...

, southwestern Virginia

Virginia

The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...

, and the Eastern Shore of Maryland

Eastern Shore of Maryland

The Eastern Shore of Maryland is a territorial part of the U.S. state of Maryland that lies predominately on the east side of the Chesapeake Bay and consists of nine counties. The origin of term Eastern Shore was derived to distinguish a territorial part of the State of Maryland from the Western...

, the chain has dwindled due to the expansion of Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. , branded as Walmart since 2008 and Wal-Mart before then, is an American public multinational corporation that runs chains of large discount department stores and warehouse stores. The company is the world's 18th largest public corporation, according to the Forbes Global 2000...

 in the region.

Stores owned by Roses were once found not only in strip mall

Strip mall

A strip mall is an open-area shopping center where the stores are arranged in a row, with a sidewalk in front. Strip malls are typically developed as a unit and have large parking lots in front...

s, but also in many shopping mall

Shopping mall

A shopping mall, shopping centre, shopping arcade, shopping precinct or simply mall is one or more buildings forming a complex of shops representing merchandisers, with interconnecting walkways enabling visitors to easily walk from unit to unit, along with a parking area — a modern, indoor version...

s. Faced with strong competition and poorly managed, many stores closed including those located in malls while the remainder never were updated to compete with Wal-Mart. Several stores are still operational. The company made a number of unsuccessful attempts to be acquired in the mid-1990s. At its peak, Roses operated approximately 278 stores, mainly in North and South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia.

Roses was purchased by Variety Wholesalers Inc. in 1997 and the company's Rose's Division has 122 stores which compete chiefly with Kmart

Kmart

Kmart, sometimes styled as "K-Mart," is a chain of discount department stores. The chain acquired Sears in 2005, forming a new corporation under the name Sears Holdings Corporation. The company was founded in 1962 and is the third largest discount store chain in the world, behind Wal-Mart and...

 and Wal-Mart. It has scaled back attempts to operate as a discount store and now focuses more on a "high-end dollar" concept.

History

Rose's Stores, Inc was founded in Henderson, NC in 1915 by Paul Howard Rose (1880–955). A merchant from his youth, Rose took possession of the Henderson store in June 1915 following dissolution of a partnership that had operated stores in Henderson and Charlotte. The chain expanded first in nearby Oxford (1916), then Roxboro (April 1917), Louisburg (March 1918) and in the Rosemary section of Roanoke Rapids (August 1918). With these five stores proving profitable, Rose and other family members began to expand into a wider area in 1920, first into South Carolina (Store No. 6, Mullins) and Virginia (Store No. 7, Franklin). Westward expansion began through North Carolina into Lenoir (Store No. 8), Statesville (Store No. 9) and elsewhere. When the chain incorporated in 1927, there were around 30 stores. Further expansion into Tennessee (Newport, No. 44, 1929) and Georgia (Dawson, No. 74, 1935) completed what would be the core of Roses' market area, which persists through to today.

Most stores were in small towns but in 1938 the company began opening outlets in the Hampton Roads, Virginia area, which would become their dominant urban market. Store 105 opened in 1938 on Colley Avenue in Norfolk, around the corner from where, three years later, the company would open a large department store, the PHR Center Shop, at the time Norfolk's most modern store. The following year, Store 106 (Ocean View Norfolk) and 107 (Downtown Virginia Beach) cemented the company's position in Hampton Roads. At the beginning of World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, there were 118 Rose's 5-10-25 cent stores. During the conflict, housing boards in Norfolk and Portsmouth asked the company to open stores in government-owned neighborhood shopping clusters in housing areas created for war industry workers.
Following the war, Roses' first real shopping center store opened in the Midtown Center at Wards Corner, also in Norfolk. Roses found the shopping center location successful and quickly went on to open stores in newly constructed centers throughout their marketing area. Early shopping center stores include No. 127 in Greenville, SC's Lewis Plaza; No. 130 in Raleigh's Cameron Village; No. 132 in Greensboro's Summit Center, and No. 135 in Jacksonville, NC's New River Plaza. Each of these stores was larger than the previous, leading the company in the direction it would take in the 1960s. When a shopping center location opened in Spartanburg's Pinewood Plaza in 1961, the building had around 50000 square feet (4,645.2 m²) of floor space and advertised itself as a "discount department store". Other similar stores opened in Greensboro, Louisville, Roanoke and Virginia Beach before a prototype store that opened in High Point, NC in 1965. From this point on until the 1990s, Roses began replacing smaller stores with these large shopping center locations.

In the late 1970s, the upscale PHR Center Shops (about six remained) were merged into the main operation while the remaining small stores were grouped into a division called "P.H. Rose Variety Stores", which the company continued to operate until it sold the remaining 50+ locations to Variety Wholesalers in 1984 to concentrate on their larger stores. When they first encountered Walmart in the early 1990s, Roses underestimated the threat, resulting in a bankruptcy and reorganization before being sold out to Raleigh, NC based Variety Wholesalers. Variety Wholesalers, dating back to the 1932 opening of Pope's 5 & 10 cent stores in Fuquay Springs and Angier, NC, continues to operate 122 stores under the Roses name.