Token - Furr's / Bishop's Cafeteria (Lubbock, Texas) ND

Reverse

Star in center

Script: Latin

Lettering:
FURR'S/BISHOP'S
CAFETERIAS,L.P.

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Plain

Comment

Roy Furr (1907 — June 13, 1975) was the president of the Furr's chain of supermarkets and restaurants. In 1929 he moved to Lubbock, where he bought six grocery stores in Lubbock TX. Furr's, Inc., grew rapidly, and at the time of the founder's death it included sixty-eight supermarkets, as well as family centers in three states, fifty-seven cafeterias in seven states, and a realty company in Lubbock.

In April 1956 a Furr's Cafeteria,opened. The operation proved so successful that Furr opened a second cafeteria in April 1956, and four more units by May 1959. The burgeoning chain to this point had been operated under Furr's Supermarkets. In June 1959, the business was spun off into a separate corporation christened Furr's Cafeterias, Inc.

Furr's Cafeterias grew steadily, numbering 11 units by the end of 1962. To be certain of a consistent quality of food throughout the chain, the company in 1968 acquired the Lubbock-based Plains Meat Company, which it renamed Quality Control Kitchens, supplying meats, cooked foods, and bakery items to Furr's Cafeterias. This operation would ultimately become the Dynamic Foods subsidiary. On November 12, 1969, Furr's Cafeteria went public, issuing 260,000 shares of stock. Aside from cafeterias, the company also opened a pie shop in Lubbock in 1969, and another in Odessa in 1971. By the time of Roy Furr's death in 1975, Furr's Cafeterias owned and operated 57 units located in seven states.

By 1979 the company was forced to file for bankruptcy. The supermarket assets were acquired by West German investors, while Furr's Cafeterias was purchased for $70 million by Kmart Corporation in May 1980. For Kmart the move into the restaurant business was part of an aggressive diversification and expansion plan that included the acquisitions of Builders Square, Waldenbooks, and Pay Less Drug Stores. Kmart hoped to complement its department stores with the addition of Furr's Cafeterias on the same pad. In 1983 Kmart added a regional buffet chain when it paid $28 million for Iowa-based Bishop Buffets, founded in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1920 by Benjamin Franklin Bishop. Kmart opened new units under both the Furr's and Bishop's names but essentially allowed them to operate independently. By November 1986, however, Kmart, saddled with debt from its diversification efforts, was looking to focus on its core retailing business and decided to unload its restaurant assets, which had grown to 133 Furr's Cafeterias, spread from Texas to California, and 35 Bishop's Buffets located in the Midwest.

In January 1988 Kmart completed the sale of Furr's Cafeterias and Bishop Buffets to investor Michael Levenson's Cavalcade Holdings of Lubbock, Texas, for $237.5 million in a leveraged buyout. Levenson then packaged the assets in a limited master partnership, Furr's/Bishop's Cafeterias L.P. and sold 11 million units at $10 each, which were then listed on the New York Stock Exchange.