David Weis

[TheFugitive]

This was about a 25 store Catalog Showroom and jewelry chain in the Pennsylvania/Ohio/West Virginia market.
They had both full-sized catalog showrooms (like Service Merchandise), and smaller jewelry-only locations in
certain malls.

My first retail gig was with them in Pittsburgh's Parkway Center Mall in the mid-1980's.
In addition to electronics, giftware, toys, baby items, and housewares that you'd find at Service Merchandise,
David Weis was unique in that they also had a substantial array of softlines (ladieswear and sportswear....mostly
Pitt, Penn State and WVU logo items in the days before they were licensed so tightly)

In the late 1980's they expanded by acquiring the Jewel Mart chain out of Cleveland.
By the time I went to work for them they had already abandoned the Service Merchandise "place your
order and wait at the belt" model, and were almost entirely self-serve.   They were very popular in the
Pittsburgh area at the time.

The chain went out of business in the early 90's.   Interestingly it is one of the few cases in
American retail history where the chain's creditors managed to force them into an involuntary
Chapter 7 bankruptcy.   Something really funky must have been going on with the books if they got scared
enough to go to a judge and say "shut them down and give us our ten cents on the dollar now, please!"