By Clint Engel

High Point - Super Stores of America, the San Diego-based retailer that added only one store to its count last year but grew sales by nearly 60%, took the title of the fastest-growing furniture store on Furniture/Today's Top 100 this year.

The 13 -store company, owned and operated by Rick Haux Jr. and once part of the now defunct The Bedroom Superstore, posted the greatest percentage sales increase of any company in the Top 100 - up 59.2% in furniture, bedding and accessories sales to $97.9 million.

On the Top 100 for just the second year, Super Stores also had the best equivalent-store sales increase (50.9%) and the eighth largest net increase in sales volume (up $36.4 million). It was one of only two companies on the list to appear in the top 10 of at least three of the five measurements used to develop the growth index.

Equivalent-store sales is a variation on the same-store sales variation developed by subtracting the percentage increase in a retailer's net store count from the percentage increase in sales. The measurement excludes six Top 100 companies that had sales increases but store-count declines last year and 10 companies with declines in both categories.

Super Stores' strength in the category is slightly misleading because it's in the process of moving out of bedroom and sofa specialty formats and into full-line MOR Furniture for Less Stores - partly through conversion but also through opening larger replacement stores.

Starting at the top

Super Stores also took the biggest leap up the Top 100, jumping 27 spots to No. 58 - although that's not part of the criteria that goes into establishing the fastest-growing furniture stores. No. 2 on the growth index was Rooms To Go, the Seffner, Fla.- based company that became the nation's largest furniture chain with 2001 sales of $1.26 billion

Reprinted with permission of Furniture/Today, the Weekly Business Newspaper of the Furniture Industry.