He was one of the wave of mid-20th-century merchants who built some of the best retailing companies in the country. The difference is that unlike many of them, Mervin Morris’s creation, Mervyn’s, is gone, the victim of corporate neglect and then private equity plundering…at least in my opinion. Morris died last week at 101, decades after his “junior department store” was sold to Target, expanded and then ultimately abandoned and tossed to the PE wolves who ran it into the ground. At its peak it was one of the best stores in the business. At the end it was just another example of the trials and tragedies of investor ownership. It’s a Stupid tale and it didn’t have to turn out that way.
Read the Mervyn’s saga — and the man behind it — in my new Forbes.com post: https://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenshoulberg/2021/08/30/mervin-morris-a-great-merchant-dies-at-101/?sh=126c7d3872dd
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