Three brothers turned what was literally a horse and buggy business into Lechmere, the well-known New England retail chain. The audio/video/appliance retailer operated for more than 20 years and at its height operated 33 stores in five states.
It all began in 1913 when Russian immigrant Abraham "Pop" Cohen opened a hand-made harness shop called Lechmere, located in Lechmere Square, a section of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He and his wife, Tillie, had a daughter Nan, and four sons; Maurice, Philip and Norman. After graduating from high school, the kids worked with their father patching tire tubes.
World War II rationing drastically reduced the supply of tires and the Lechmere Tire Company suffered. Maurice and Philip served in the Army and Navy, respectively. Norman, the youngest, stayed home to work with their father in the tire shop. After the war, industries converted back to manufacturing consumer goods and returning GIs started families. To fill the increasing demand, the brothers began to stock appliances, buying wherever they could find them - a refrigerator from one distributor and a toaster from another. The Cohen brothers also played a major role in the founding group of the National Appliance and TV Merchandisers (NATM).
To increase sales volume and build a customer base, the brothers called on companies, making deals to sell appliances to their customers at below list prices. They also renamed the business Lechmere Sales. The brothers were store salesmen by day and appliance delivery men by night while their sister ran the office. Their combination of market inventiveness, aggressiveness and savvy enabled the brothers to continually grow the business.
In the late 1940s, they added 6,000 square feet of sales space to their three-story building at 4 Cambridge Street. Because space was limited, they kept only samples on the floor and introduced the in-store pick-up counter, where the customer's product was delivered by conveyor belts from the stockrooms upstairs. By 1952, sales volume had reached $2 million. In 1956, the brothers bought the former Scully bus garage that was then converted into Lechmere's main retail location. The Cohen's again expanded to include televisions, records, jewelry, sporting goods, luggage and housewares.
To promote the expansion, the brothers printed their own 64-page newspaper, which they mailed to 100,000 homes. To help customers remember the address, the brothers famously priced everything to end with 88 cents. Lechmere was also one of the first local retailers to advertise extensively on television.
The Cohen brothers were as well known for their promotions as for their merchandise. For instance, every year on Washington's Birthday they sold thousands of cherry pies for 22 cents. In 1956, the brothers distributed $15,000 worth of tickets to the movie "Around the World in Eighty Days." They bought out the Ringling Brothers' circus one night each year, and sold the tickets to "Lechmere Night at the Circus" below cost to their customers. Even the elephant carried a sign reading "I bought my trunk at Lechmere." Despite a recession in the late 1950s, Lechmere's sales increased 23 percent. Equally famous were the brothers' "picnic sales" each spring, when the entire store's merchandise was moved into the parking lot, and the once-a-year Saturday night "private sale."
The brothers doubled Lechmere's space with a steel-framed 100,000 square foot building in 1963 so they could expand Lechmere's selection to include office equipment, bath accessories, books and greeting cards. They also sold tires in the four-bay car servicing garage. Lechmere became such a well-known fixture in the Boston area that many residents believed the local commuter train station was named for the store, rather than vice versa.
The brothers' first store outside Cambridge opened in Dedham in 1965. To fund further expansion, the Cohen's sold the business to Dayton Hudson in 1969. In the next two years, two more Lechmere stores opened, one in Danvers and another in Springfield. Mass.; a fifth store opened in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1977. The chain expanded to more than two dozen locations, was again sold, first to Berkshire Partners in 1989, then in 1994 to Montgomery Ward, which could not maintain what was special about Lechmere, and closed the business three years later. A 2009 survey in Boston found that Lechmere's was the most missed defunct store in the region. By the mid 1970s, all three Cohen brothers had retired.
Maurice and his wife, Marilyn, established the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University where he was a trustee until his death in 1995. Norman focused his energy on the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel until his death in 2008. Philip and his wife Bella established a scholarship program for Hebrew University among other philanthropies and reside in South Florida.