Heilig-Meyers was a retail furniture store chain founded in Goldsboro, North Carolina, in 1913 by two Lithuanian immigrants, W. A. Heilig and J. M. Meyers. Its corporate headquarters was in Richmond, Virginia. The chain grew to become the largest furniture retailer in the United States in the 1990s, ultimately having over 1,000 stores nationwide (including Puerto Rico).
Its over-expansion—by purchasing over 100 McMahan's Furniture stores based in Carlsbad, California, in 1993, as well as other stores and chains in the West—contributed to its failure. The company also bought the L. Fish furniture chain in the Chicago area; those stores were closed in 1999.[1]
Heilig-Meyers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on August 17, 2000,[2] and subsequently announced the liquidation of its inventory, with all of their stores closing by mid-2001.[3] The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported in 2000 that the company failed when its large expansion did not succeed in creating sufficient revenue and when customers who had previously used the company's in-house credit began using credit cards instead. The company's credit customers had grown increasingly weary of lower quality.