Hills stores in New England?

[Retail_247]

Does anybody else find it kind of odd that even though Hills was headquartered in Massachusetts, they only had one location in the entirety of New England? (Former Berkshire Mall Lanesborough MA)

Were there any other Hills stores in New England? Most of them were in Ohio and Pennsylvania

[BillyGr]

It did seem kind of odd - not only just that one store (barely) in New England, but even once you moved into NY you had to go some distance to find them (that is, none around the Albany area which would have made sense given that is fairly close to the Berkshire Mall store).

[TheFugitive]

I finished up my retail career with Hills.  They were a strange company in that indeed they were headquartered, in Canton, MA, yet they had no stores anywhere near there.  The executive offices and the buyers were located in Canton.  Much of the company's nerve center (operations, logistics, LP) was actually located at another facility at Green Garden Plaza in Aliquippa, PA near Pittsburgh.

This created some strange anomalies.  For example, when the top brass wanted to tour a store they'd head to Logan Airport, fly to Pittsburgh, and go to Store #60 which was in Robinson Township, a short drive from the airport.  Every year in late August the management decided they wanted to preview what that year's Christmas set would look like so they would convert Store #60 entirely over to CHRISTMAS so that they could tour it. I got drafted to participate in this several times and it was bizarre.  It would be 80 degrees outside and inside we'd have tinsel, trees, pictures of Santa, etc.  Customers would wander in and think we'd flipped our lid!  We'd also chew up a big chunk of our district's payroll making that store look pretty for VIPs, leaving us all to run very lean for the rest of the quarter.