Three Bears: Corporate

In 1980, Larry Weisz left a successful career with a major food merchant and struck out for new frontiers--both professionally and geographically--by purchasing a small grocery store in Tok, Alaska. And the store soon developed a loyal following throughout eastern Alaska. In 1989 Larry opened the first store to carry the name "Three Bears" in Valdez, Alaska. In 1993 the company continued to grow with a third store, a combination superconvenience store (fuel station added in 2002), located in Seward, Alaska. Soon, all of the stores came to be called Three Bears and carried a larger selection than a convenience store but still smaller than a full-size supermarket. Essentially, these three stores were designed to be "just right" for the communities they serve.

But bears grow big in Alaska, so in the mid-1990's, Three Bears expanded again by developing a new mini-warehouse store format in Kenai, Alaska. By 2004, the Kenai store had grown to 48,000 square feet and carried a mix of bulk warehouse products and conventional grocery products that was again "just right" for the community. Of course, as bears grow and then grow some more, they need to increase their territory, so Three Bears opened another mini-warehouse store (51,000 square feet this time) in Alaska's Mat-Su Valley in July 2005.

Now, one would think that Alaska would be big enough to contain a bunch of growing bears, but it turns out that in 2007 Three Bears headed for the Lower 48 and opened a new mini-warehouse store (61,000 square feet) in Butte, Montana.

Of course, Alaska is still plenty big and a bunch of roaming bears never know when they might come across a cabin in the woods--or an existing mini-warehouse building new on the market--that's "just right" and simply too good to pass up. So, in late 2007, Three Bears began remodeling a 2-year-old mini-warehouse building located in the Mat-Su Valley on the Parks Highway at the intersection with Pittman Road (see Three Bears: Meadow Lakes). And this newest store opened and began serving the community on "leap day" (February 29th), 2008.