Did the Ames Green/Teal colour actually come from Zayre?

[108CAM]

Been wondering this ever since reading the Wikipedia article about Ames. It states that Ames "traded in its traditional red and white colors for the green color present in Zayre stores"
I can't find any photos of a Zayre store with the Ames Green/Teal inside and I'd really like to find one so I can see how it looked when Zayre used the colour.

[TheFugitive]

Personally I doubt it.  I worked for Ames at the time of the Zayre acquisition.  I spent six weeks converting a Zayre store in Jacksonville, Florida to an Ames location.  The whole Ames-Zayre merger was a disaster which led directly to the first bankruptcy.  Not many people at Ames had a good feeling about Zayre after this happened and that color change would not have been looked at positively.  Also I believe it was later in the 1990's when Ames changed the color scheme and I'm pretty sure that at that point Peter Hollis (Ames' CEO who drove the merger and had previously been CEO of Zayre Corp.) was gone.  So the new CEO (Joe Ettore I believe) would have no personal investment in that.

I think the reason is pretty simple actually.  Many discount chains were using some variation of the red-on-white color scheme at the time (Ames, Target, Venture, Hills, Kmart).  I remember customers used to get confused and would actually make out checks to the wrong store chain at the checkouts. The change I think was a pretty rational attempt to stand-out from the rest of the field. 

[108CAM]

That makes sense. The timing of the colour change lines up pretty well with when Ames recovered from it's first bankruptcy. I'm thinking that the decision to change colours was part of the restructuring plan that companies go through during a Chapter 11 Bankruptcy filing.

The change would have made the stores look modern and attracted more customers while making Ames stand out from other chains that used the a red and white colour scheme.

As for the claim about the colour originating from Zayre, I think whoever wrote that part of the Wikipedia article may have gone to a Zayre that was midway through it's conversion to Ames and got the colours mixed up. (Perhaps the inside had gotten it's green wall stripes but the exterior signage hadn't yet been changed from Zayre to Ames.)

During the Zayre to Ames conversions, the first Zayre stores that were converted to Ames used the Red & White scheme however the later conversions used the Green/Teal & White colours because Ames swapped it's colours part way through the long process of converting the nearly 400 Zayre stores they had acquired.

[TheFugitive]

No color swap occurred during my time with Ames.  None of the converted Zayre stores stuck around very long.  They were closed en-masse after the bankruptcy filing.  I always felt bad for those people in Jacksonville because they worked so hard to convert the store yet were out of a job barely a year later.  When I left the company in 1992 they were still using red and white. And by then the ex-Zayre locations were gone.