Joseph and Leon Samuels opened a discount menswear shop called the Manufacturers Outlet Company on Weybosset Street in Providence in 1894. It grew quickly, and expanded into a full department store with the construction of a new addition in 1903. The company launched its own radio station WJAR in 1922, and television station WJAR-TV in 1949. The company acquired a series of other broadcast media companies across the country from 1963 onwards. It also opened other Outlet Company department stores beginning with a branch in Cranston in 1962.

In 1976, long-time employee Bruce Sundlun (later governor of Rhode Island) assumed the presidency of the Outlet Company. Joseph Samuels Sinclair, grandson of a founder, remained chairman of the board. Under Sundlun, Outlet began acquiring other small retail chains across the country, and continued to acquire broadcast companies as well. The Broadcast House in Providence was constructed in 1979 to house operations of the company’s flagship WJAR radio and television stations. A national recession that same year crippled the company’s retail operations, and the company decided to redirect its energies exclusively toward broadcast media in 1980. The Department Stores division (by now 91 stores) was sold to United Department Stores in November of 1980, and the purchaser closed the downtown flagship store in 1982. The Outlet Company merged with the Rockefeller Group in 1984, ending its independent existence and the Samuels-Sinclair family involvement. It continued as a division of the Rockefeller Group called Outlet Communications, which continued to operate WJAR/TV until selling it to NBC in 1996.

Bibliography:

Smart, Samuel Chipman. The Outlet Story, 1894-1984. Providence, R.I.: Outlet Communications, 1984

–Providence’s Recent Past (2010), a PPS map by Ned Connors.

Last edited March 19, 2025 by Keating Zelenke