Thirty-Two Thousand Square Feet of Sofas, and a Race Car Parked Out Front
At 9:30 on the morning of Friday, Sept. 4, somebody cut a ribbon on Old Fort Parkway, a Joe Gibbs Racing No. 11 car sat gleaming near the entrance for people to photograph, and Murfreesboro acquired 32,057 square feet of sofas it did not have the day before.
Bob's Discount Furniture is open at 2075 Old Fort Parkway, in the Towne Centre, and its arrival is a slightly bigger deal than one more storefront filling in on a busy road. The chain did not ease into Tennessee. It opened four Middle Tennessee stores on the same morning — Murfreesboro, Franklin on Galleria Boulevard, Clarksville on Wilma Rudolph Boulevard, and an outlet store in Madison on Gallatin Pike North — which is less an expansion than a landing.
A furniture chain built on a personality
The company is an East Coast institution making its way inland. It runs more than 200 showrooms across the country now, and it built that footprint on a formula that will be familiar to anyone who has ever watched late-night television: low prices, loud advertising, and a founder whose name is on the sign. The pitch has always been that furniture should not require a financing seminar — that a couch is a thing you buy, take home, and sit on.
The Murfreesboro store carries the company's signature quirk, too. There is a café inside, and the snacks are free. Coffee, cookies, that sort of thing, handed out to anybody who walks in, whether or not they leave with a sectional. It is a small gesture that does a lot of work in a category where shoppers browse for an hour and leave three times before they commit.
The opening came with a check
The ribbon-cutting was not purely ceremonial. The company distributed $5,000 in charitable donations at the Murfreesboro opening, directed to the Dow Street Community Music School and Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee — one a local program putting instruments in the hands of Murfreesboro kids, the other the regional food bank that supplies pantries across dozens of Middle Tennessee counties. Local dignitaries turned out, as they generally do when a national retailer decides a city has arrived.
Executives on hand for the launch included Stephen Moeller, the company's executive vice president and chief growth officer, and Debbie Brown, its vice president of retail operations, alongside regional sales director John Stowell. Day to day, the store is run by manager Kosondra Higgs.
Another entry on a very long list
Put this one on the pile. Murfreesboro has spent the past several years absorbing national retail at a pace that would have seemed implausible when the Old Fort corridor was still mostly a route to somewhere else. Rutherford County's population growth has done what population growth does — it draws site-selection teams, and site-selection teams draw ribbon scissors.
The furniture store lands in the middle of an unusually crowded season for openings around town. Wawa opens on Veterans Parkway on Sept. 10, with a Buc-ee's working its way toward the finish line not far behind. A city that once drove to Nashville for almost everything is steadily running out of reasons to.
For the fuller picture of where everything sits, our guide to Murfreesboro's shopping centers maps the corridors — including the Towne Centre stretch of Old Fort Parkway where the newest ribbon just fell.
