"Mrs. B" was the nickname of Rose Blumkin, the founder of Nebraska Furniture Mart, which is the largest home furnishings store in North America. Mrs. B founded the business in 1937 and sold a majority interest in it to Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company controlled by Warren Buffett, in the early 1980s.
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“Even if Rose Blumkin, the 100-year-old founder of the Nebraska Furniture Mart, stopped showing up every day to sell carpets, the company would still qualify as one of the most unusual retailing enterprises in the nation.
“While Mrs. B, as everyone around here knows her, continues to zip around the Furniture Mart’s outlet store on her three-wheeled cart, her grandsons are successfully bucking the common wisdom that big retailers cannot prosper without expanding beyond their original location.”
—Barnaby J. Feder, “A Retailer’s Home-Grown Success,” The New York Times, 13 Jun 1994, p. C1.
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