Savers

thumb|Savers in Boston, Massachusetts Savers Value Village Inc. is a publicly held, for-profit thrift store retailer headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, United States, offering second hand merchandise, with supermajority ownership by private equity firm Ares Management. An international company, Savers has more than 315 locations throughout the United States, Canada, and Australia, and receives its merchandise by paying money to non-profit organizations for donated clothing and household items. Savers is known as Value Village in the Pacific Northwest, the Baltimore metropolitan area, and most of Canada, and Village des Valeurs in Quebec. Chicago stores and some locations in the Washington, DC metropolitan area are under the name Unique. In other regions of the U.S. and in Australia, the stores are named Savers.

== History == The company was founded by Bill Ellison in 1954 at a former movie theater in the Mission District of San Francisco, California. By 1970, the chain had six thrift stores in the states of California, Oregon, and Washington under various names, including Value Village and Thrift Village. The company's headquarters were moved to Bellevue, Washington in 1970 and expanded to Canada with a store in Vancouver that opened in 1980. In October 1997, the first Savers store in Australia opened in Brunswick, Victoria. Ellison was the chairman of the company until 2000; he died in 2008.