A Depression lumberyard and a cash-and-carry idea.

Payless Cashways started as a single lumberyard in the Iowa countryside. The company history in Gale’s International Directory of Company Histories says that in 1930 Sanford “Sam” Furrow, helped by his sons Sanford and Vernon and a colleague, John Evans, bought a lumberyard in Pocahontas, Iowa, that had defaulted on its loans; English Wikipedia gives the same founding year, place and partners. By mid-1932, Gale says, Furrow had added yards in the Iowa towns of Early and Webster City, giving each of his sons a business to run.

The first names were not his own. Gale says Furrow was still working for the Fullerton Lumber Company and called the Pocahontas business the Kiefer-Wolfe Lumber Company to keep his ownership quiet; when Fullerton found out in 1933 he left and went to work at the renamed Pocahontas Lumber Store. The early yards, Gale writes, sold mainly lumber, paint and builders’ hardware.

Price advertising arrived early. In 1937, according to Gale, Furrow opened the Webster County Lumber Store in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and advertised “Live and Let Live Prices” set without regard to what the history calls the Lumber Trust, a group of regional dealers tied together by a pricing agreement. Over the decade the yards added plasterboard, ceiling tiles, insulation and asphalt shingles.

The phrase in the later name came next. After the Second World War, Gale says, Furrow and Evans split their partnership, and in 1947 Furrow opened a yard in Iowa Falls run by Vern Furrow, where Vern tried the “cash-and-carry” policy that the chain later adopted everywhere. Contractors had been used to buying on credit; selling for cash allowed lower prices, and Gale says the change, together with direct-mail advertising, drew in homeowners doing their own repairs. Wikipedia describes the same shift, with the Furrows selling on cash-and-carry terms rather than taking on the risk of contractors buying on credit.

From family yards to a Kansas City chain.

The scattered yards became a chain in the 1950s. Gale says Vern and Sanford Jr. set up a wholesale company, Iowa Lumber and Supply, in 1951 to pool purchasing and distribution, and its chronology dates to 1955 the unification of the stores’ accounting and advertising under the name Payless Cashways. The chain spread into Minnesota, Illinois and Arizona by the end of that decade, and later into New Mexico, Colorado and Nebraska, before going public as Payless Cashways, Inc. in 1969; Vern Furrow retired in 1971, ending four decades of family management, Gale says.

The company moved its headquarters to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1977, according to Gale, and by 1981 it was pursuing suburban customers: its president, David Stanley, told Business Week that year that the stores would supply “virtually all home building needs”. It also grew by acquisition, and kept the names it bought. Wikipedia, citing The Wall Street Journal, says Payless agreed in December 1982 to buy Lumberjack Stores of Sacramento, California, and completed the purchase of Somerville Lumber & Supply of Somerville, Massachusetts, in April 1984; citing the Minneapolis Star Tribune, it says the purchase of Knox Lumber of St. Paul was completed in October 1986 and that Knox kept its own name.

In 1988 the company was taken private. The New York Times reported in May 1988 that an investor group headed by Asher B. Edelman, together with Sutherland Lumber-Southwest, had built a stake in Payless, and on 30 June 1988, the paper reported, the board approved a leveraged buyout led by senior management, which it described as an apparent effort to discourage Edelman. A further Times report that July said an unnamed foreign company had asked for financial information about a possible bid; Wikipedia identifies that bidder as The Ward White Group, which ran a similarly named retailer in Britain.

Gale says the company returned to the stock market in 1993 and turned towards professional builders, with separate contractor entrances, phone and fax ordering, delivery and free coffee, and tested formats called Home and Room Designs and Tool Site; in 1996 it launched a “dual market” strategy in Phoenix aimed at both trade and do-it-yourself customers. Payless filed for Chapter 11 protection on 21 July 1997, The New York Times reported, and emerged in 1998, according to Gale. After a second Chapter 11 filing in June 2001, Gale says, the bankruptcy court appointed liquidators in September 2001; Wikipedia dates the liquidation order to 10 September 2001.

Design and documentation.

A home-improvement store brand is carried by more than a logo. It sits on a tall roadside sign meant to be read from a moving car, on the fascia above the entrance, on shopping carts and on the aprons and name badges worn by the staff who walk the aisles. It is printed on weekly circulars and newspaper inserts, on paint-can labels and on the stickers and tags that mark what is on sale.

Many of these chains grew out of lumber yards and hardware counters, and the yard side of the business left its own marks: names stencilled on delivery trucks, stamped on bundles of wood and painted on the sheds where contractors loaded up. When a chain changes owners, closes or is folded into another company, those objects tend to outlive it, turning up in old advertisements, archived photographs and the memories of shoppers.

Each guide in this group looks at one store name: who started it, who owned it over time and what became of it, and how its signs, ads and printed matter presented the store to the people who shopped there. The colours shown are our own reading, not an official specification.

A red arrow, a lumberjack and a family of banners.

When the stores were brought under that name in the 1950s, Gale’s company history says, they adopted a logo featuring a curved red arrow together with Payless Pete, a caricature of a lumberjack.

The name could not travel everywhere. Gale says that stores opened in Texas, Oregon, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, California and Indiana traded as Furrow’s because of trademark conflicts in several markets, and Wikipedia gives Indiana as an example, where Payless was already the name of a grocery chain. As the company bought regional chains it kept their names too, so that by 2000, Gale says, its divisions traded as Payless Cashways, Furrow, Lumberjack, Hugh M. Woods, Knox Lumber and Contractor Supply. Late in its life the company added a trade division called PCI Builders Resource in 2000 and renamed its website PCIBuildStreet.com, using its corporate initials rather than any store name.

The stores themselves were built around a working lumberyard. Wikipedia describes the routine: customers paid for materials inside, then drove into the yard and handed their order ticket to an attendant who loaded the goods. The company also told its own story in print; Gale lists Aged in Wood: The Story of Payless Cashways, Inc. by Virginia Sugg Furrow, published by the company in Kansas City in 1984.

For a design guide, Payless Cashways shows how a plain price promise, a red arrow and a lumberjack character could sit above a family of regional banners, and how a trademark clash can force one chain to trade under two names. Compare it with Menards, the Midwestern home-improvement chain it competed with, and The Home Depot. For this guide we use arrow red, pine and timber brown with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Payless Cashways’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.