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www.wbjournal.com • Worcester Business Journal 31 25 YEARS: IMPACTFUL COMPANIES T he more things change in the C-suite at the profitable $27-billion TJX Cos., the more they stay the same. In 2006, the publicly traded parent of dis- count retail chains T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods underwent a series of changes when Ben Cammarata took over after CEO Edmond English resigned in 2005 amid lackluster results. English had taken over as CEO from Cammarata in 2000 and opened more than 900 stores during his tenure. Cammarata — who orchestrated TJX's success as CEO from 1976 to 2000 — was joined in his makeover efforts by new president Carol Meyrowitz, a 20-year TJX veteran who had served as a senior vice president and president of the MarMaxx division before leaving the company in 2005. Besides returning to what he called "sweaty palms" buying, Cammarata and his team cut expenses, eliminating 250 positions at company headquarters. Company officials took a 10-percent pay cut. TJX also substantially cut back its store expansion plans. The year before, in 2005, Cammarata closed TJX's e-commerce website ven- ture after a little more than a year of operation, citing limits in the merchan- dise it could offer and disappointing results. TJX returned to the virtual world of online sales eight years later. That move did not come as a surprise, Internet Retailer reported about a year ago, because Meyrowitz had said more than a year earlier that online retailing was in TJX's future. In fact, in late 2012, it acquired e-commerce expertise when it bought discount outdoor-apparel retailer Sierra Trading Post, No. 102 in Internet Retailer's 2013 Top 500 Guide to Retail Web Sites. The cash deal for the privately held Sierra, founded in 1999, was valued around $200 million. On its home turf, TJX continues to reign supreme. In 2012, for example, a Framingham special town meeting voted to give the company a 20-year tax break to keep its world headquarters in town. B J's introduced the warehouse-club concept to the northeastern U.S. in 1984. Since then, it has expanded to Maine, Florida and as far west as Ohio. Today, it operates more than 200 stores in 15 states, including several in Central Massachusetts that employ more than 2,500. The discount-retail landscape is lit- tered with the nameplates of companies associated with BJ's. When Zayre sold its name to rival Ames in 1988, TJX was formed. In 1989, TJX spun off its ware- house division, consisting of BJ's and now-defunct HomeClub — later known as HomeBase, then House2Home — to form Waban. In 1997, Waban spun off BJ's as an independent company, while Waban renamed itself HomeBase. BJ's has had its share of struggles. In 2011, the company moved its corporate headquarters from Natick to Westborough, closed five underper- forming stores in the Southeast, elimi- nated about 100 headquarters jobs and restructured its home office and some field operations. That same year, BJ's — then ranked No. 232 on Fortune's list of America's 500 largest public corpora- The higher your deposit accounts and outstanding loan balances, the more you could get back! ACTON | CHELMSFORD | FITCHBURG | GARDNER | GROTON | LANCASTER | LEOMINSTER | LUNENBURG | ORANGE | TOWNSEND We're giving back over $ 2,000,000 of our fi nancial success to members in 2014! The is in business. Find out how much your business accounts could pay you: GiveBackCalculator.com workerscu.com | 978-345-1021 | Live or work in Massachusetts? You can become a member. is in business. of our is in business. Find out how much your business accounts could pay you: TJX Cos. Chairman Ben Cammarata and CEO Carol Meyrowitz have been remaking the Framingham-based company over the last eight years. TJX BJ's Wholesale Club Laura Sen is president and CEO of BJ's Wholesale Club. >> Continued on Page 32 18 19