King's Variety Store

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

M.H. King Company began as M.H. King’s Burley, Idaho, variety-store business in 1915. The company was incorporated in 1926, succeeding the original partnership, and grew into the chain customers knew as King’s Variety Stores. Long before every errand involved a parking-lot safari, King’s was the dependable local stop for a little bit of nearly everything.

Its stores stocked the classic variety-store spread: toys, hardware, housewares, clothing, domestics, electronics, crafts, seasonal goods, furniture and giftware. By 2013, the family-operated chain said it had grown from its original Burley store to 26 locations in six states, with an emphasis on convenient, friendly small-town service.

King’s reached communities across Idaho and neighboring Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming. Stores typically ran from about 10,000 to 20,000 square feet—large enough for useful surprises, small enough that the fluorescent lights could still feel vaguely personal.

In February 2017, King’s announced that it would close its remaining stores amid a retail environment reshaped by big-box competition and online shopping. The chain ceased operations that May, ending more than a century of Idaho-rooted general merchandise retailing.

Our King's Variety Store collection celebrates the era when a hometown store could sell school supplies, a saucepan, a toy truck and an emergency birthday gift without needing an algorithm—or a warehouse the size of a county.