Rose Blumkin and the Rise of Nebraska Furniture Mart

She could not read a sales contract in English, but she could look at a rug and tell you what it should cost down to the penny. Rose Blumkin ran her store that way for more than sixty years. If you have ever walked the enormous showroom at Nebraska Furniture Mart near 72nd and Dodge, you have stood inside the empire this one tiny woman built from almost nothing.

Rose was born in a village near Minsk, in what is now Belarus, in 1893. One of eight children. She left home young, walked and rode her way across Russia, and eventually made it to America around 1917, following her husband Isadore, who had gone ahead. She landed in Omaha in 1919. She spoke no English and had almost no money. What she had was nerve and a head for numbers.

For years she helped run the family's second-hand clothing shop while raising four kids. But Rose wanted her own thing. In 1937, at 43 years old, she borrowed $500 from her brother and opened a furniture business in the basement below her husband's downtown store. That is the year Nebraska Furniture Mart counts as its start. She had no fancy inventory and no showroom to speak of. She sold whatever she could get her hands on, and she sold it cheap.

That was the whole idea, really. Four words she lived by: sell cheap and tell the truth. She would buy furniture, carpet, appliances, anything, and mark it up just a little over cost. Then she would tell customers exactly what it cost her and exactly what she was making. People had never seen anything like it. The bigger stores downtown were furious. Some manufacturers cut her off because she undersold everyone in town.

So she got creative. When suppliers refused to sell to her directly, she bought from stores in other cities and hauled the goods back to Omaha. At one point the established dealers hauled her into court, claiming she was violating fair-trade pricing laws. Turns out, the judge threw the case out. Then he came to her store the next day and bought carpet for his own house. That story got around fast.

The business grew and grew. She moved out of the basement, opened bigger locations, and eventually pulled everything together into one massive store on 72nd Street, the same spot that anchors the Mart in Omaha today. By the early 1980s it was the largest home furnishings store in the whole country, selling more furniture, carpet, and appliances than anyone thought a single store could.

Here is the part Omaha loves to tell. In 1983, a local investor you may have heard of came calling. Warren Buffett, whose own Omaha story we cover over in our piece on the Oracle of Omaha, wanted to buy the Mart for his company, Berkshire Hathaway. He did not send in a team of accountants to comb through her books. He did not demand an audit of her inventory. He asked Mrs. B what the business was worth, she told him, and they shook hands on it. Around $60 million, for roughly 90 percent of the company. Buffett later said her handshake was worth more than most people's signed contracts. He got the numbers he needed on a single sheet of paper and trusted her word for the rest.

She kept right on working. She was in her nineties by then, zipping around the acres of showroom floor on a little motorized scooter, still pricing goods, still barking orders, still putting in something close to a seventy-hour week. She had no interest in slowing down.

Things did get bumpy. In 1989, in her mid-nineties, Rose fell out with the family and the company over how the carpet department was being run. She quit. She did not sit still, though. Three months later she opened her own rival shop, Mrs. B's Warehouse, right across the street from the Mart, and started competing with the store she had founded. She was still sharp enough to hurt their sales. In 1992 Berkshire simply bought that store too, and she signed a non-compete agreement, at 99 years old. She reportedly demanded that Buffett actually pay her for it, and he did.

Rose Blumkin kept coming to work almost to the end. She died in Omaha on August 9, 1998, at 104 years old. She had gone from a dirt-poor village girl who could not sign her own name in English to one of the most respected retailers in America, a woman Buffett put right up there with the sharpest business minds he ever knew.

The store she started in a basement is still here, still busy, still selling to Omaha families getting their first couch or their fifth. Next time you are out that way, it is worth remembering that the whole thing began with $500, four honest words, and a woman who refused to be told no.

Omaha is full of stories like this, built by immigrants and dreamers who turned grit into something lasting, from the stockyards that made us the cattle capital to the neighborhoods still growing today. To keep exploring the city and find something to do this week, take a look at our Explore Omaha event calendar.