Who is hanover direct

The company originally made its mark as the operator of the famed Automat restaurant chain on the East Coast. It was founded by two men in Philadelphia, Joseph V. Horn and Frank Hardart. Legend has it that he received only a single reply to his ad, a line scribbled on a torn sugar sack, reading, 'I'm your man!

Horn and Hardart's first lunchroom did very well, with its fine coffee a key selling point. In , Hardart took some time off from the business to travel to Europe. It seems to have been a working vacation, however. The Automat concept was that customers would deposit nickels into gleaming machines, and hot or cold food would be dispensed automatically.

The Automat served not only fine coffee, but staples of American cooking including roast beef, meat loaf, creamed corn, and blueberry pie. The Automat's staff was located in a central kitchen and did not interact directly with the customers. The food was cheap but good, with the nickel coffee all but legendary. With stained glass windows conceived by the same artist who designed the windows for the city's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Times Square Automat was a bold building, attracting not only poor boardinghouse dwellers but movie stars and Broadway singers.

The chain eventually expanded to include 84 stores in New York and Philadelphia. The Automats were enormously popular in the two cities in which they existed. The food quality was consistently good, something personally assured by founder Horn. Every day he and his top management team tasted the foods the Automat's central kitchens had prepared, and whole batches were thrown out for such sins as the lack of a little oregano.

The quick efficiency of the Automat concept appealed to busy workers as well as night-owl theater patrons, and the chain was an East Coast institution. With millions of people poor and out of work, the Automats had a huge new customer base of people who could afford nothing better. At the peak of the Depression, the Automats in New York and Philadelphia boomed, employing more than 10, people. Workers were offered free meals per three hours worked, plus a Christmas bonus. Efforts to unionize Automat's workers failed, as its employees seemed to consider that they already had one of the best deals around.

The restaurants were often satirized in cartoons and publicized in films such as Easy Living in and the Irving Berlin musical Face the Music from While the restaurants continued to be something of a cultural institution, the chain's heyday was past. Other restaurants such as drive-ins and McDonald's carved out new niches for fast food. The quality of the food declined, and the low prices made the Automats gathering places for only the destitute.

When Daly died in , he left no clear successor, and the chain drifted, its restaurants becoming steadily dingier and more out of touch with the times. Automat workers unionized in , and the cost of paying increased benefits to workers drove the company into the red.

But it persisted under new management, and it still had various valuable assets. Although it closed nearly all of its Automats, the company still controlled the valuable Manhattan real estate on which its restaurants stood. Some lots were sold, and other Automats were converted into Burger King restaurants. The firm was being run by Chairman Fred Guterman since He won a proxy fight, and Guterman resigned.

What Florescue left in place were the mail-order business and the company's 12 Manhattan Burger King franchises. Both the catalog and food divisions of the company grew under Florescue's direction. Hanover House expanded from six catalogs in to a line of 21 by Up to 60 percent of the company's sales came from its catalog division in the early s.

Hanover's catalogs were aimed at middle-market consumers and sold gifts, electronics, clothing, and home furnishings. It was one of the nation's largest catalog operations, and in the early s, sales increased in double digits. The division also spent money, investing in a huge, centralized distribution center in Florescue also invested in other restaurant chains. Some were not successful, such as a pizza chain called Mark Twain Riverboat Playhouse.

The company moved its headquarters to Las Vegas in when Florescue bought a casino there, and that business also faltered. The company's move into franchising Arby's restaurants did not go as well as expected and had to be scaled back, while also causing dismay at Burger King.

Bojangles was centered around Charlotte, North Carolina, and it had approximately 50 stores in the South and Northeast. Florescue hoped to take Bojangles from the fourth largest chicken chain to number two behind Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Bojangles was supposed to be an upscale chicken chain, costing more to run but bringing in more per store than the market leader Kentucky Fried Chicken. The chain grew extremely rapidly and was run by hundreds of franchisees.

The Bojangles image was hard to sustain outside the South, where it originated, and by , many stores were failing. Investments 1. Ownership Status. Privately Held backing. Financing Status. Corporate Backed or Acquired. Primary Industry. Internet Retail.

Other Industries. Catalog Retail. Primary Office. What you see here scratches the surface Request a free trial. Want to dig into this profile? Request a free trial. Hanover Direct Executive Team 2 Update this profile. Hanover Direct Signals.

Growth Rate 0. Weekly Growth 0. Size Multiple x Median. Key Data Points Twitter Followers 5. Similarweb Unique Visitors Majestic Referring Domains Hanover Direct Acquisitions 1.

Hanover Direct Subsidiaries 2. Hanover Direct Exits 1.