04/12/2026
Businesses lessons
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She started with $500 borrowed from her brother and a simple rule: sell cheap, tell the truth, don’t cheat the customer.
That rule built an empire. And it outlived every competitor who tried to destroy her.
In 1937, Rose Blumkin opened the Nebraska Furniture Mart in the basement of her husband’s secondhand clothing store in Omaha. She was 44 years old, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who had arrived in America speaking no English. The name on the sign was enormous. The reality was a cramped basement with cheap inventory and handwritten price tags.
Her philosophy was absolute. While the established downtown furniture stores operated on margins of roughly 50 percent, Rose priced her goods at cost plus 10 percent. No exceptions. No promotions. Just math.
Working-class families in Omaha could suddenly afford furniture they had never been able to buy before. The basement shop filled up. The inventory turned over fast. The downtown merchants noticed their customers disappearing.
They didn’t respond by lowering their prices.
They contacted the furniture manufacturers in Chicago, Michigan, and New York and issued a coordinated ultimatum: if those factories kept selling to the Russian woman in the basement, the major downtown retailers would cancel their accounts. The manufacturers looked at their ledgers and made the obvious choice. The supply lines to Rose’s store went silent. Checks came back uncashed. Orders went unfulfilled.
Rose did not close the shop.
She bought train tickets to Kansas City, Chicago, and New York. She walked into the large department stores in those cities, found their wholesale buyers, and offered to purchase their inventory for cash. She bought carpets, shipped them back to Omaha by freight, hauled them into her basement, and priced them at cost plus 10 percent. Even with the middleman markup built in, she was still cheaper than every downtown competitor in the city.
The established merchants escalated. In 1939, three major Omaha retailers coordinated a lawsuit against her, claiming she was violating the state’s Fair Trade Act by selling below the manufacturer’s mandated minimum retail price. They hired expensive legal counsel. They were powerful men — second-generation merchants, chamber of commerce executives, men with connections throughout the city’s commercial establishment.
Rose went to court. She brought her purchase orders. She brought her ledgers. She explained her arithmetic to the judge in her heavy accent. Cost plus 10 percent. She was not selling below her own cost. She was simply choosing to take a smaller margin than the men in suits.
The judge dismissed the case.
The boycott unraveled. The manufacturers eventually realized that if they refused to sell to her directly, she would simply buy their goods from middlemen elsewhere and undercut them anyway. The supply lines quietly reopened.
The basement shop expanded. It moved to larger downtown spaces. It kept expanding until it moved to a new campus on South 72nd Street. A tornado leveled that location. Rose and her son Louie rebuilt it on the same spot, bigger than before. The store kept growing.
In 1983, Warren Buffett came calling. He sealed the purchase of a majority stake for $60 million with a handshake. No audit. No review of the books. He simply asked Rose if she owed any money. She said no. That was enough.
“I felt like I had the Bank of England on the other side,” Buffett later said.
He also said: “I’d rather wrestle grizzlies than compete with Mrs. B and her progeny. They buy brilliantly, they operate at expense ratios competitors don’t even dream about, and they then pass on to their customers much of the savings.”
But the story did not end with the sale. At 95, Rose retired. Within months, she found she could not stand it. She opened a competing store directly across the street from the business she had built and sold. She called it Mrs. B’s Clearance and Factory Outlet. Within a short time, it was the third-largest carpet store in Omaha. Buffett bought that store too, and merged it back into the Mart. He joked afterward that he would never again let her retire without making her sign a non-compete agreement.
Rose Blumkin worked until she was 103 years old. She moved around the cavernous store on a golf cart in her final years, still calling out to customers. She died in 1998 at the age of 104.
The downtown stores that sued her are gone. The original retail families sold out or went bankrupt decades ago. The store she opened with a borrowed $500 in a cramped basement now covers 77 acres in Omaha, with additional locations in Kansas City, Dallas, and Des Moines.
Buffett once said that students from forty universities visited him every year. “If they absorb Mrs. B’s lessons,” he said, “they need none from me.”
Her motto never changed from the day she opened: sell cheap, tell the truth, don’t cheat the customer.
It turned out that was enough.
