American Furniture Warehouse
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
American Furniture Warehouse (AFW) is a privately held furniture retailer headquartered at Meridian, Colorado. It was founded in 1975 by entrepreneur Jake Jabs in a former American Furniture Co. store location at 58th Avenue and Bannock in Denver, Colorado.[1] AFW now has 12 Colorado locations across Denver, and from Fort Collins to the north all the way to Pueblo and Colorado Springs in the south and to the Western slope in Glenwood Springs.
AFW is well known in the Colorado Front Range area for its claims[2] to be Colorado's largest or number one furniture retailer and for its frequent advertisements featuring founder Jake Jabs and his tigers. His local fame is such that Jabs was featured, along with Ron Zappolo, Tom Shane, and Jay Cutler, in the cartoon South Park season 11 episode entitled 'Guitar_Queer-o' as a 'celebrity'.[3]
Jake Jabs' self-published autobiography 'An American Tiger' was panned by local weekly newspaper Westword when it was released in 2001 as "overstuffed" with "dozens of pages from his American Furniture Warehouse customer-service and employee policies."[4]
In 2003 American Furniture Warehouse Co. and Value City declared they would no longer buy bedroom sets from companies whose executives signed a petition charging China with illegally dumping cheap furniture in the United States including Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co., Hooker Furniture Corp., and La-Z-Boy Inc.[5]
[edit] References
- ^ "Corporate History Page". http://www.afwonline.com/about.asp. Retrieved on 2008-10-09.
- ^ "Chuck Green: Plotting by Jabs not jake". Denver Post. http://extras.denverpost.com/news/green0330.htm. Retrieved on 2008-10-09.
- ^ ""South Park" drops names, takes jabs". Denver Post. http://www.denverpost.com/entertainment_old/ci_7423001. Retrieved on 2008-07-07.
- ^ "Best Autobiography by a Furniture Magnate". http://www.westword.com/bestof/2001/award/best-autobiography-by-a-furniture-magnate-39757/. Retrieved on 2008-10-09.
- ^ "Furniture retailers strike back against tariff supporters". Triad Business Journal. http://triad.bizjournals.com/triad/stories/2003/12/08/story2.html. Retrieved on 2008-10-09.
