Monroe Milstein, who turned a $75,000 investment in a derelict New Jersey garment plant into the nation’s third-largest discount retailer, Burlington Coat Factory — which he would sell in 2006 for more than $2 billion — died on May 9 at his home in Bal Harbour, Fla. He was 98.
The cause was complications of dementia, his grandson Samuel Milstein said.
Mr. Milstein’s career was not quite a rags-to-riches story, unless the word “rags” is synonymous with garment center merchandise in general.
In 1972, he and his wife, Henrietta Milstein, ventured her savings as a Long Island teacher and transformed a former factory in Burlington, N.J., which they had bought for $675,000, into a mecca for busloads of frugal customers. They lured their patrons from the Philadelphia metropolitan area and beyond to buy marked-down designer and brand-name coats for women and, later, linens, men’s wear, baby clothes and shoes.
By the time they had divested themselves of their family-run company, it was operating 367 stores in 42 states and had recorded sales of $3.2 billion annually.
The Milsteins sold their shares for $1.3 billion.
“I’m a very average fella,” Mr. Milstein said on his 80th birthday. “I got lucky.”
The Burlington Coat Factory — which was not affiliated with the fabric maker Burlington Industries — thrived by placing large orders for merchandise directly from manufacturers, for department stores’ unsold seasonal items and for other surplus products, and then selling the goods at a 20 to 60 percent discount from retail prices.
“Manufacturers love to sell to us because we move merchandise and don’t make demands,” Mr. Milstein told New Jersey Business magazine in 1987. “The only problem comes about when they’re threatened by other retail accounts who don’t want to compete against off-pricers like us.”
Monroe Gerald Milstein (he changed his middle name to Gary when he was in college) was born on Jan. 14, 1927, in the Bronx. His father, Abe, who was born in Russia, founded Amherst Fashions, a wholesaler. His mother, Ann (Isaacs) Milstein, helped out when her son started his own business.
When Monroe was 11, the family moved to Manhattan. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and earned a bachelor’s degree in business from New York University in 1946.
In 1949, he married Henrietta Haas, an elementary-school teacher who fled the Holocaust in Europe when she was 9 and went on to develop Burlington’s children’s division; she died in 2001.
In addition to his grandson Samuel, his survivors include three sons from that marriage, Lazer, Andrew and Stephen Milstein; his wife, Judith (Kirshenbaum) Milstein, whom he married in 2003; five other grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren. (His sister, Barbara Beyda, and two of his children died earlier.)
In 1946, Mr. Milstein joined his father’s wholesale coat and jacket business in Manhattan’s garment district. He was also selling retail on Saturdays, so successfully that his wife persuaded him, against his father’s advice, to withdraw her savings to buy the former Burlington factory, which had housed a failing business on the Delaware River in suburban Philadelphia that made and sold dresses for Jonathan Logan.
The Milsteins opened their first store in the building, in an area that would become a hub for factory outlets. Their second store, which opened in 1975, was in Copiague, N.Y., on Long Island, and overseen by their son Lazer, who as an Orthodox Jew kept it closed on Saturdays. The store flourished on Sundays, when few other retailers were open.
Another store, on Park Place in Lower Manhattan — the company’s first in that borough — was in the news when sections of landing gear and fuselage tore through the roof and several floors after terrorists crashed United Airlines Flight 175 into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
According to family lore, Mr. Milstein was once renovating a former furniture store in Pine Brook, N.J., when a demolition company presented an exorbitant estimate for razing a wall. He spotted a highway crew working nearby; they agreed to knock down the wall for two cases of beer.
The company had philanthropic partnerships with a number of charitable organizations, including the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the Warm Coats and Warm Hearts Drive, and WomenHeart, which supports women with heart disease.
Mr. Milstein was chairman, chief executive and president of the Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corporation, a no-frills operation (for a long time he rode to work by bus), until he retired in 2005. His sons were executives of the company, which had the third most outlets in the country, behind TJX, which operates T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, and Ross Stores.
The family took the firm public in 1983 and sold it to Bain Capital, an investment firm, in 2006.
Mr. Milstein was well regarded by his former employees. Judy Grassi, who worked for Burlington for 31 years, recalled on the obituary website Dignity Memorial that Mr. Milstein liked to say, “If you like your job, it’s not work.”
Another former colleague, Cheryl Resnick, recalled on the same site: “We all were using technology to place our buys; Monroe went by his gut.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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