There will soon be just one Ben Franklin store left in Iowa.
Fifty years ago, there were more than 100 Ben Franklin stores in the state, but there’s a store closing sale underway at the Ben Franklin in Eagle Grove — and the Ben Franklin in Sheldon will be the last one operating in Iowa. Phil Warnke says he and his wife were relatively young when they bought the store in 1991.
“Most of the others have retired as they get into their 70s,” Warnke says. “Some of the other younger ones did change the name and go with other names, where we chose to go with the Ben Franklin name.” The original Ben Franklin chain went bankrupt in 1996, but Warnke has been paying a licensing fee just to be able to keep the name on the building.
“There’s been a store associated with that name in our town for over 100 years,” Warnke says. “We figured no matter what we changed the name to, to the local people it’s always be the old Ben Franklin store, so we thought it was just better identification if we just kept the name.” Warnke says when the Ben Franklin company went out of business 27 years ago, that actually helped his operation because as a franchise, his store had to buy and stock company products.
“It did open up different products for us that we weren’t able to carry by being just a strictly company Ben Franklin store,” Warnke says. The Ben Franklin store on the town square in Winterset closed in December after 83 years in business. The owner of the Ben Franklin store in Nevada retired last November and the store closed.
The Ben Franklin store in Eagle Grove announced its “store closing” sale on Facebook a few weeks ago, but has not set an end date.
