BJ's Wholesale Club, Inc. is a warehouse club operator in the eastern United States. As of February 2, 2002, the Company operated 130 warehouse clubs in 15 states, and had approximately 6.9 million members. Warehouse clubs offer a narrow assortment of brand name food and general merchandise items within a wide range of product categories. In order to achieve high sales volumes and rapid inventory turnover, merchandise selections are generally limited to items that are brand name leaders in their categories. Since warehouse clubs sell a diversified selection of product categories, they attract customers from a wide range of other wholesale and retail distribution channels, such as supermarkets, supercenters, department stores, drug stores, discount stores, office supply stores, consumer electronics stores, automotive stores and wholesale distributors.