Courtesy of the Feldberg Family

Courtesy of the Feldberg Family

Sumner Feldberg (MBA 1949), who died on July 1, 2022, was remembered in an obituary in the Wall Street Journal as an innovator in the field of retail. He grew up in Newton, Mass., the child of Jewish immigrants from Russia, and served as a meteorologist for the Amy Air Forces during World War II before attending HBS. There he joined the class of 1949—which also included “James E. Burke, who later headed Johnson & Johnson; C. Peter McColough of Xerox Corp.; Thomas S. Murphy of Capital Cities/ABC Inc.; and William Ruane of the Sequoia Fund,” according to the article. Feldberg’s roommate was Marvin Traub, who later ran Bloomingdale’s, the high-end department store chain.

After HBS, Feldberg worked for his father at Bell Shops, where he unpacked and inspected merchandise. “Mr. Feldberg soon recognized that the business was overly dependent on downtown locations that were losing shoppers to suburban malls. Some New England rivals were opening discount stores in abandoned textile mills, which came with cheap rents and plenty of parking space. Mr. Feldberg, who had studied the history of retailing at Harvard, thought the mill stores were merely a fad. Instead, he bet on supermarket-style stores, with self-service, offering clothing, toys, beauty supplies and housewares. That idea became the basis for the family’s chain of Zayre discount stores, introduced in 1956 with two locations in Massachusetts,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

That initiated a period of growth for the company, which went public in 1962. In time Feldberg also helped establish the BJ’s Wholesale Club and T.J. Maxx retail chains, which bought surplus merchandise from the same brands shoppers could find in upscale department stores, then sold it with a deep discount. “He challenged the idea that people in retailing needed instincts about style and fashion,” the article states. “In most cases,” he said, “it is common sense and hard work—hard work to study what’s selling.” Feldberg retired as chairman of TJX in 1995; he was 98 at the time of his death.

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