Department Stores: The West’s Biggest Chain

As a crack clothing salesman working his way through U.C.L.A., Edward William Carter did so well that he went out and hired a boy to do nothing but write up his orders. “I never do anything,” says Carter, “if I can get somebody else to do it.” That philosophy of delegation has seemed to work. At 34 only eight years out of graduate school, Carter became the $60,000-a-year merchandise manager of the May Co. in Los Angeles. Today he is the president and chief executive of California’s 28-store Broadway-Hale retailing chain which he has built from a three-branch, $30 millon-a-year operation into the West’s largest department-store group (1964 sales: a record $219 million).

Ed Carter’s ability to delegate authority has not only made him a successful retailer but enabled him, at 54, to spread his personal enterprises into dozens of cultural and civic departments. Besides keeping watch on the important things at Broadway-Hale, Carter is involved in activities that range from the Los Angeles County Art Museum (president) to the University of California’s board of regents (chairman).

Though retailing in growth-giddy Los Angeles has lately suffered from overexpansion, Broadway-Hale is busy growing at a $25 million-a-year pace.

Last winter the company bought one-third interest in Oregon’s largest department-store chain, Meier & Frank and this spring battled its chief rival in Los Angeles, the May Co., to a stalemate when both firms tried to merge with Meier & Frank. Broadway-Hale will open its 29th store, an $8,000,000 building, next month in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey. It has 14 other projects in the works, including an expansion in Phoenix that will push Broadway-Hale ahead of its Arizona competitors and new stores in Reno and Las Vegas that will make the company Nevada’s largest retailer.

Enjoyable Surroundings. Broadway-Hale’s stores and merchandise—”not the highest fashion, but in good taste ” says Carter—reflect the character of the suburbs, where the company does 80% of its business. There are few cut-rate prices, but customers get what Carter likes to call “an atmosphere of quality”—surroundings carefully calculated to make the process of shopping smoother and more enjoyable.

That pattern began to take shape almost as soon as Maryland-born Ed Carter quit the May Co. in 1946 to join Broadway (he took a $10,000 salary cut in return for stock options). His first move was to stop construction of a small new branch, double its size (and cost) and convert it into the national prototype of regional shopping centers with ample parking, underground deliveries, competing stores in the same complex. Unable to invade the rich San Francisco market directly, Carter doubled his sales by merging with Hale Bros later bought up the Dohrmann Hotel Supply chain for its hidden asset: a 24% interest in the highly profitable Emporium Capwell Co., northern California’s top retailer (ten stores).

Community Footprints. Today, on top of a $174,000-a-year salary, Carter owns $6,600,000 worth of Broadway-Hale stock. He collects 17th century Flemish paintings, often drives to work in his black Jaguar, lives in Bel Air with his handsome second wife, the former Hannah Locke Caldwell, a member of the first (1936) U.S. women’s Olympic ski team.

Dividing his crowded days among business, education and culture. Carter serves as a director of Pacific TelePhone & Telegraph, Northrop, Southern California Edison, United-California Bank and Western Bancorporation, as a trustee of the Brookings Institution and Occidental College and as a director of the Stanford Research Institute. Though his rimless glasses and whisper-quiet voice give him the air of a professor (he once declined an offer from the Harvard Business School to become one), Carter is still a shrewd salesman. When he was asked to raise 12 million to help build the Los Angeles Art Museum, he persuaded 23 acquaintances to donate $125,000 and up by offering to name a gallery after each and urging: “Here’s a chance to leave your footprints in the community. Ed Carter, of course, is stamping his footprints on a whole region.