M@C Discount continues legacy of former tenant
If they don’t have it, you don’t need it.
When Butler County residents used to walk into a Trader Horn, they were greeted with all different kinds of items from lumber, to hunting licenses, to electrical wire and so much more.
M@C Discount, an online retail liquidation auction that moved into the former Trader Horn location at the Greater Butler Mart, is aiming to keep that trend going, but with a slightly different business model.
“We buy liquidation products from different retailers. It could be anything from overstocks to returns and damaged items,” M@C Co-owner Kellen Campbell said. “We buy by the truckload, bring it into our warehouses and process it for sale. Everything starts at one dollar, free to bid and whatever it sells for it sells for.”
M@C was started in late 2017 by Campbell and Shawn Allen, two University of Pittsburgh graduates.
They first met when they worked at GENCO, now owned by FedEx under the name FedEx Supply Chain.
"When FedEx acquired GENCO, they were not interested in the space,“ Campbell said. ”My job was to bring in new business. Then we realized there was not anybody in the area doing this on a big scale.
"We just got to the point we decided to take a stab at it. Bought our first truck in early 2018 and off we went."
M@C’s first location was in Washington, Pa., and since 2017 they have grown to seven total locations.
Their website is broken down by locations because some stores might not have something the other has, but there are some similarities.
"Every location sells a little bit of everything," Campbell said. "The big box stuff ends up at our Pittsburgh Mills location and Washington location because of the size of those warehouses."
Items include TVs, computers, kitchen goods, furniture, air compressors and much more.
Their items are also broken down into condition, which can range from unused items, to items that are missing pieces, but M@C does their best to make sure customers know what they are buying.
"Our conditions can be really diverse," Campbell said. "From items that are brand new, to items that are damaged, missing pieces or somewhere in between.
"We do a brief inspection when we process the items. We use three different condition codes. We use like new, open box and damaged codes."
M@C is almost exclusively customer pick up and do very little shipping Campbell explained.
"We sell somewhere between 10,000 to 15,000 items per day," Campbell said. "We have hundreds of truckloads coming in each month. The volume is a lot."
Butler M@C general manager Thaddeus Rosenbauer has been with the business since 2018 when he started at the Washington location.
"I'm from the Butler area, I went to high school here,“ Rosenbauer said. ”We originally opened our Butler store in 2020 when COVID hit, out past the farm show grounds. We began to expand, then in August 2021 I moved up here to become General Manager and open the new location."
Rosenbauer started from the bottom and worked his way into management, and he explained the new position comes with some different responsibilities.
"It's a different dynamic than I'm used to," Rosenbauer said. "I'm used to being on the floor working the positions. Here I have 50-some employees and it's a lot more deskwork and paperwork than I'm used to."
Trader Horn opened in 1952 and was a prominent place within the Butler community until it closed down in 2016.
M@C’s Butler location still has some signs of the past tenant, and with Rosenbauer’s Butler roots, he felt the need to preserve that legacy.
"Being the old Trader Horn building, this is a very established building in the eyes of Butler County," Rosenbauer said. "We had to build a dock in the back to accommodate 18-wheeler trucks. We haven't painted over the old logos or anything.
"I feel there is a kinship between this building and the town. I tried to preserve that as much as possible. I remember coming into Trader Horn as a kid and just seeing random stuff, they had a little bit of everything, which is what we do here at M@C."
