Long familiar local retailers like Christmas Tree Shops and national behemoths like Bed Bath & Beyond are plunging into bankruptcy reorganization and closing some locations. Places like Benny’s are long gone, and the return of Ames is apparently some sort of a weird hoax.
Yet North Kingstown, R.I.-based Ocean State Job Lot just keeps on trucking. On its first day in operation four and a half decades ago, it did $78 worth of business; this year, Job Lot and its affiliates (more on this in a second) are on track to do about $1 billion, its CEO Marc Perlman said.
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How have they done it?
For one thing, Job Lot is what’s called a closeout operation. When another company goes out of business or can’t afford to pay the bills, Job Lot will take product off the suppliers’ hands at a discount. The goods are still perfectly good, and the supplier would rather sell them for less than not sell them at all.
Job Lot is now swimming in stuff once destined for Bed Bath & Beyond, which it can buy, and then sell, cheaper. But it’s not just rugs and bath towels; the company also finds deals on e-bikes and medjool dates, fancy French jams and sunscreen and … well, you get it. As the company puts it, it may not always have the same kind of toothpaste, but it always has toothpaste.
“We just bought 45,000 pinatas,” CEO Marc Perlman explained by way of example, distilling Job Lot down to its very essence. “We’re offering value to someone who wants a pinata. That’s what we do.”
So the struggles of Christmas Tree Shops and Bed Bath & Beyond can be, in turn, a boon to Ocean State Job Lot. Closeout operations will also take product off someone’s hands if, say, a shipment included too much linguine and not enough fettuccini; Job Lot helps restore balance in the pasta universe.
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“The amount of closeouts that seem to be available today is extraordinary,” Perlman said. “And we can pass that along to our customers.”
For another thing, Job Lot has a surprisingly diversified array of business interests. A job lot is an eclectic array of leftover type things. Ocean State Job Lot is sort of the corporate version of that, owning all or parts of multiple car dealerships, a paper goods company, an importer of products from Turkey, multiple Israeli tech firms, and, perhaps most surprising of all, two Providence restaurants — the brasserie Red Stripe and the upscale Mill’s Tavern.
The ownership in those two restaurants, through what’s called Encore Hospitality Group, isn’t a secret, but it’s not exactly widely known, either. Perlman said the company got involved because the people who opened them knew how to make good food, but didn’t know how to make money.
Job Lot does. And the story about how it first learned how to do it goes back decades, to when Perlman was working as a cabbie in New York City.
There, in lower Manhattan, he saw stores of extraordinary value, with a customer base as varied as the merchandise: people who needed to save money, and Wall Street types who simply enjoyed saving money. Perlman would eventually start buying goods from bankruptcies, bringing them to his parents’ basement, and selling them at flea markets.
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What became the Job Lot empire started with three people: His brother Alan, who’d been a lawyer in upstate New York, and Roy Dubs, a friend at the University of Rhode Island. They each put up $500. They opened their first store in North Kingstown 46 years ago.
The privately held Jot Lot now has more than 150 stores from Maine to Pennsylvania ― including 50 in Massachusetts, the most in any state. At the store in Seekonk, you can get a triple-action grill brush for $6 (it’s $1 more expensive at a nearby box store) or a pair of Steve Madden sunglasses for $7. A sign in the window advertises a 20 percent food discount for seniors from 8 to 9 a.m. on Mondays, of a piece with the company’s community-oriented efforts like coat drives.
Job Lot is always looking for efficiencies. Ron Coffey, who runs the workers’ cafeteria at the distribution center in North Kingstown, is also the manager of Red Stripe and Mill’s.
“You see different arms of the business, but the common thread is everybody seems really happy,” Coffey said.
Coffey, for one, said it’s sort of a running joke at work when people learn about new things.
“I found out about a month ago that they own a soap company,” Coffey said.
The Job Lot empire is indeed vast. Asked about the exact corporate relationship between Job Lot and the Providence restaurants, Perlman said he’d have to check with his CFO.
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“But the good news is,” Perlman joked, “I can always get a reservation.”
Brian Amaral can be reached at brian.amaral@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @bamaral44.