Zayre CONCEPT Calculator Series

Overview

Zayre Corporation was founded in 1956 by Stanley and Sumner Feldberg in Hyannis, Massachusetts tracing back to the New England Trading Company in Boston founded already in 1919 by the two brothers Max and Morris Feldberg.
Zayre (Gut), which means "very good" in Yiddish, was started as a discount department store chain.

In 1976 Zayre launched T.J. Maxx, a new off-price chain selling family apparel and home fashions and in 1984 a new warehouse retail concept to the Northeast called BJ's Wholesale Club was introduced. In 1988, Zayre sold their own nameplate to Ames Department Stores, Inc., a rival discount department store chain, and the company renamed itself to The TJX Companies, Incorporated. Ames acquired the bankrupt 392 Zayre stores, closing 74 of them. After some reorganizing in 1990 Ames announced in August 2002 to go out of business and closed the remaining shops in October 2002. 

Zayre launched already in August 1975 the CONCEPT series of portable electronic calculators with the introduction of the first CONCEPT 24, probably a rebadged Lloyds calculator. From much higher interest for the Datamath Calculator Museum are the CONCEPT I, CONCEPT II, and CONCEPT III calculators introduced in June 1976 and based on the Texas Instruments TI-1200, TI-1250, resp. SR-16 II calculators. The CONCEPT series was discharged in August 1977 with the clearance sale of the CONCEPT COMPACT calculators.

We recently researched with the incredible Google news [Search Archives] function hundreds of American newspapers and compiled a complete timeline of the Zayre CONCEPT calculators.

Timeline of Zayre CONCEPT Calculator Series

How rare is this calculator?

This is probably the most put question to the Datamath Calculator Museum. The answer is not easy, but we have to factor in two figures:

The Texas Instruments TI-1200 and TI-1250 were manufactured in the millions and you find them still everyday on flew-markets, online auctions or as common trades between calculator collectors. The SR-16 II is slightly more difficult to find, it was replaced after less than a year by the successful TI-30 / SR-40 calculators. 

But the CONCEPT I, CONCEPT II, and CONCEPT III calculators share a completely different story! These calculators were distributed exclusively by Zayre Corporation in a very short time slot between June 1976 and December 1976. To make it worse – from a collectors point of view – was 1976 the climax of the Calculator War and every week cheaper yet more sophisticated calculators arrived in the shelves of the department stores.

As a matter of fact survived only few of these calculators and (as of January 14, 2010) we know:

Fellow collectors - if you own a Texas Instruments CONCEPT I, CONCEPT II or CONCEPT III calculator,  please report us the serial number and date code from the back of the calculator for our Database.

If you have additions to the above article please email: joerg@datamath.org.

© Joerg Woerner, January 14, 2010. No reprints without written permission.