MainStreet (department store)

MainStreet

Type	Department store
Industry	Retail
Founded	1983, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Defunct	1988
Fate	Converted or Sold to Kohl's
Headquarters	Bannockburn, Illinois, USA
Area served	Chicago metropolitan area, Detroit, Michigan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Twin Cities, Minnesota
Products	Clothing, footwear, bedding, furniture, jewelry, beauty products, home electronics, small appliances, housewares
Parent	Federated Department Stores

MainStreet was a department store chain based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The chain was launched in November 1983 by Federated Department Stores (now known as Macy's, Inc.).^[1] Throughout the 1980s, the chain expanded to twenty-nine stores in Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota. By 1988, MainStreet was sold to the Wisconsin-based chain Kohl's, which converted most MainStreet locations to Kohl's that year.

History[]

Federated Department Stores, now known as Macy's, Inc., founded the MainStreet chain in 1983 with seven stores in the Chicago, Illinois area. The store was a middle-market chain focused primarily on softlines, similar to Kohl's and Mervyns. MainStreet stores often featured a "racetrack" layout like a discounter, but checkouts were distributed around the store like a traditional department store. The first locations outside the Chicago area opened around Metro Detroit in 1986.^[2]

The MainStreet chain was sold by Campeau Corporation, then-owners of Federated, in order to reduce debts following Campeau's buyout of Federated.^[3] Kohl's acquired twenty-six of the twenty-nine MainStreet locations in 1988 for $90 million,^[4][5] and converted them to the Kohl's nameplate in March 1989.^[6] The only remnant of this store's name and logo still in use is MainStreet Square, a strip mall in Downers Grove, Illinois that originally had a MainStreet store as its anchor before it was converted to a Kohl's, but the strip mall name stayed the same.

References[]