Hendrik Meijer (Hengelo, 28 December 1883 - Grand Rapids, May 31, 1964) was a Dutch-American entrepreneur. He is the founder of the American chain Meijer. Lifecycle
Meijer was the son of a laborer of the Stengel machine factory Stork. In 1896 he started working as a student spinner at a textile department of Stork. After a few years of military service, Meijer emigrated with his father and sister to the United States in 1907, where he landed in Holland in Michigan. The protestant way of life of the Dutch emigrants mostly did not contain the anarchist and socialist set Meijer. He tried his luck in different places and professions and settled in Greenland in 1912. He left his fiancé Gezina Mantel from the Netherlands in the same year and married her.
During the Great Depression, things went less, Meijer started a grocery store next to his hairdressing salon in 1934. Initially under the name of North Side Grocery, it was later modified in Meijer's Grocery and from 1936 in the Thrift Market. He borrowed over $ 300 to store a first stock of goods. His fourteen-year-old Fred Meijer was one of his employees. Meijer introduced self-service and the customer card in his store and regularly bought lots of goods elsewhere, which he then sold at a high price. After the first store was expanded several times, Meijer focused on opening offices in Greenville, under the name of Meijer's Super Market.
In the fifties, Meijer was one of the first in the region to set up shops with cashiers. Around 1960 he had over twenty stores. In 1962 he introduced the hypermarket in the US. In the property in Grand Rapids, he first tried to rent rooms to different entrepreneurs. When it did not get well, he decided to use the space under the name Meijer Thrifty Acres to sell a wide range of both food and non-food goods. Meijer used the concept of one stop shopping for his concept; one store where you can buy everything.
After Meijer's death in 1964, his son Fred Meijer expanded the retail chain, with hypermarkets in five different states. In 1986, the name was changed from Meijer Thrifty Acres to Meijer. Publication
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