BJ's Wholesale Club, Inc. - Delaware

Beautiful engraved specimen certificate from BJ's Wholesale Club. This historic document was printed by American Bank Note Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of a family next in front of a BJ store. This item has the printed signatures of the Company's President and Secretary.


Certificate Vignette

BJ's Wholesale Club, Inc. NYSE: BJ is a membership-only warehouse club chain operating in the East Coast of the United States, as well as in the state of Ohio.

History

The company was started by Zayre, a discount department store chain, in 1984, on the Medford/Malden border. This was and still is the company's flagship store.

When Zayre sold their own nameplate to Ames, a rival discount department store, TJX Companies was formed which owned BJ's. TJX spun off their "warehouse division," consisting of BJ's and now defunct HomeClub, to form Waban, Inc. Later Waban spun off BJ's to became an independent company, headquartered in Natick, Massachusetts.

As of December 2006, BJ's operates 173 BJ's warehouses and 2 ProFoods Restaurant supply clubs in 16 states. Today, BJ's common stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "BJ". The letters B and J are commonly misinterpreted to stand for Berkley and Jensen which is also a brand name sold in their stores. In fact, it stands for Beverly Jean, the daughter of one of the company founders. BJ's competitors include Sam's Club and Costco Wholesale clubs.

BJ's Wholesale club in Virginia

BJ's Today

Today, BJ's operates over 160 Clubs and employs over 19,500 Team Members (both full and part-time).

BJ's offers a variety of special benefits to its members. These include "member pricing", a variety of name-brand products at discount wholesale prices, acceptance of all valid manufacturers' coupons, and acceptance of many forms of payment (including cash, check, ATM/debit cards, and all major credit cards). Some clubs also accept food stamps, although not all do.

Memberships at BJ's are required for these benefits and are available to individual consumers and businesses. BJ's memberships normally last for 12 months from the date of purchase and are required to be renewed yearly to maintain their validity. As of August 2006, a standard individual membership at BJ's costs $45 per year. In addition, BJ's also has a special "Rewards" membership that may be purchased for $80, allowing a small percentage of all of a member's purchases to be "rewarded" and redeemed for use towards future BJ's purchases. Business members may apply to purchase BJ's products for resale, and those of nonprofit organizations may apply for tax-exempt privileges (where applicable). Members with expired memberships (if they choose not to renew), as well as non-members are allowed to shop, but are assessed a 5-15% surcharge (depending on the club and the circumstances) on their total, and are not allowed to pay by check. However, if non-members keep their receipts with the surcharges shown on them, and they total to at least $45, they can use that for a membership. To aid in convenience, most BJ's memberships can be renewed at the register during checkout.

Many of BJ's clubs offer special services to members, such as gas stations, home heating oil, propane filling, pharmacies, an optical department, car rentals, and vacation packages. These services vary from location to location. As of 2006, there are 44 BJ's Clubs with pharmacies, 145 Clubs with an optical department, and 87 Clubs with BJ's gas stations. As of 2007, BJ's has decided to close all pharmacy operations in its clubs.

History from Wikipedia and OldCompanyResearch.com.

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About Specimens

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.