Video Title: "Dick’s Sporting Goods — A Pennsylvania Success Story"
Video Summary: Edward Stack, Executive Chairman of Dick’s Sporting Goods, tells the story of the company’s growth and describes why Pennsylvania has been a good place for the company to do business.
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EDWARD STACK: The company was started back in 1948 by my father as a small bait and tackle shop.
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EDWARD: He was working for an Army Navy surplus store in Binghamton. The guy who owned the store said to my father, who was an 18-year-old kid at the time, you know, you're a big fisherman, I want to get into the tackle business. Now, can you go and tell me what we need to get into the tackle business?
So, he went home and he put this order together, came back and gave the order to the guy who was in a grumpy mood that day, crossed half of it off, told my father he was a dumb kid, didn't know what he was doing. And my father took the piece of paper away from him, walked out of the store, went over to his grandmother's house. In talking to his grandmother, was pretty upset about it all.
She finally said to him, what would it cost you to start this business yourself? And he said, $300, which was a lot of money back then. And his grandmother got up and walked to the corner of the kitchen and dug into this old cookie jar and took out $300 and gave him the $300 and said, go start this business yourself.
Audio description: typewriter keys clicking as text that reads “Pittsburgh, PA” appears onscreen.
EDWARD: So, when we decided to move the company to Pittsburgh, we only had nine stores, and as we were looking to grow the business, we felt that we were going to have a difficult time doing that out of Binghamton, New York. So, we looked at a number of different cities.
We were a small company at the time, and we ended up coming to Pittsburgh, and we're so glad we did. One of our teammates, he wasn't sure he wanted to move to Pittsburgh, but we really wanted him to move with us. Now, we hadn't really finalized that we were doing this, but we said, why don't you go to Pittsburgh for the weekend? We'll pay for it. See what you think about Pittsburgh and come back, and we'll talk on Monday when you come back.
He came back in on Monday and I said, I said, how'd you like it? He said, Mary and I bought a house. I said, you bought a house. We haven't even decided that we were moving to Pittsburgh. He goes, we came through the tunnel and opened up and saw that city at night, and we both looked at each other and said, this is the place we want to be.
Pennsylvania will always be the epicenter of our business, and in particular Pittsburgh. We've got a lot of plans. We continue to grow our business. We're expanding it with new concepts and new businesses. And, we love Pennsylvania.
We would encourage anybody who's looking to start a business or looking to grow their business and need a new place for a corporate headquarters. You really should look at Pennsylvania.
Governor Shapiro's tagline is Pennsylvania gets it done. And I can tell you that Dick's Sporting Goods got it done in Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania definitely helped us get it done.
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