Ann & Hope Department Stores

Ann & Hope is a Rhode Island-based retailer that pioneered practices now common in modern big box stores. Named after the ship Ann and Hope, which was lost at sea off Block Island, Rhode Island in 1806, the store operated from 1953 to 2001 in the Northeastern United States. Currently the company operates a small chain of home fashion outlets, garden outlets, and dollar outlets in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Ann & Hope was founded by Martin Chase, who was born in 1906 in Kiev, Ukraine, and moved with his family to Providence, Rhode Island at age six. He was the only one of six sons not to work in his father's automobile repair business. Instead, when he was 20, he got a job working at a store called Fintex. After Fintex...