Dave Kloeber Has a Plane to Catch

Kloeber began his working life in the Denver area, where he has two Unique outlets. It was 1972, he was 11, and he worked on collection trucks for another thrift-store business. All summer and on weekends during the school year, he would leave home at 5:30 a.m. and walk about two miles to the store. After work, he mowed lawns. Kloeber says he didn’t think of his family as poor; everyone in his neighborhood “lived about the same way we did . . . . We had food.” At the same time, “I’d do anything to make some money,” he remembers.

He describes his father’s job as being a sort of “troubleshooter for retail businesses.” The family moved around. Born in California, Kloeber grew up in Missouri and Colorado, attended 11th grade in Texas, and graduated from high school in Arizona. He lived in his car during his senior year in Arizona, after his mother told him that as long as he lived under her roof, he had to abide by her rules. (He says, “I tell my kids the same thing now.”) During most of his high school career, Kloeber says he worked 60 to 70 hours a week—in a meat market in Texas, doing front-end alignments in Arizona, loading thrift trucks everywhere—which is how he could afford a car.

He did not attend college. The Denver thrift store that employed him at 11 was part of a family-owned, nationwide chain, and in 1980 Kloeber went to work for the family as a sort of troubleshooter himself. He put in 16 hours a day, he says, Monday through Saturday, and drove around the country from outlet to outlet. In 1984, the chain’s owner rewarded him with a management contract for a Minneapolis store, which put a temporary stop to Kloeber’s constant travel. But by 1988, he had saved enough money to open his own thrift in St. Louis. One by one, he added others. That led to buying and managing a number of the strip malls where the thrifts were based—which led, in turn, to other real estate ventures. By 2002, when Northwest Airlines broke the camel’s back with its lap fee, he was logging more than 150,000 air miles annually.

That’s because Kloeber doesn’t just own, in full or in part, his far-flung businesses. He is a notoriously hands-on and detail-oriented manager. “I probably make about 100 flights a year,” he says. “In two days, I might do four legs [such as St. Paul to St. Louis to Baltimore to Tampa to St. Paul]. I used to try to do that commercially.” So JetChoice has no more appreciative member than Kloeber himself. He says the thing he likes best about private-jet travel is that it allows him to spend an average of one or two extra nights a week at home.

Not that this means catching up on lost sleep. He sleeps 4.5 hours a night, and says this has been so since childhood. Kloeber typically rises at about 3 a.m., works out in his home gym, and is on line handling e-mail by 5 a.m. On days when he isn’t flying, he likes to make his sons breakfast before going to his D.N.K. office in Maplewood. He finds time to serve on the boards of the Lupus Foundation of Minnesota and his daughter’s school, Mounds Park Academy. All that, and he’s a 10-handicap golfer.

From the perspective of a person who wants eight hours of sack time and likes to zone out in front of the TV, Dave Kloeber’s routine, even vicariously, is exhausting.

Still a Bag Boy

Just after the February dawn, the Falcon 50 lands at Jefferson County Airport in the Denver suburb of Westminister, near the first store we will visit. The plane pulls up next to a waiting rental car. In 30 seconds, we’re on the road. Kloeber checks in at home by cell phone and talks to Bing.

There’s a detour: He has to make a stop at the storefront office of Qiviut, Inc., a thrift-collection operation that he manages for the Lupus Foundation. Qiviut (Kloeber says “KIH-vut,” Webster’s says “KEE-vee-ut”) is an Inuit word for the downy undercoat of the musk ox. Someone else was responsible for the name, but Kloeber heartily approves, delighted that it is one of the few “q” words that doesn’t have “u” as its second letter.

Despite the extra stop, by 8 a.m. we’re parked in front of the Unique thrift store—surrounded by a buffet restaurant, a tanning parlor, a dry cleaner, and a comic-book shop—in a Westminister strip mall. Kloeber forgot that the regular manager is at the other Denver-area store today, and the assistant manager doesn’t show up until 8:15 (the store opens for customers at 10 a.m.). While we wait, Kloeber drags out his laptop computer and answers e-mail in the car.

He isn’t here for a meeting. He and the assistant manager don’t say much more than hello. Instead, Kloeber walks the aisles, noting the mix of merchandise, the color-coded tags that indicate how fast the inventory is being turned over, and whether the floor has been swept carefully. Tonight he will send an e-mail to the store manager with instructions for improvements. One will be to speed up the transition from winter clothes to spring ones.

“My philosophy is, never give a manager more than five things to do before your next visit,” Kloeber says. “If you give them more, nothing will happen.” He tries to visit each of the 20 Unique and Valu stores in his national chain every five weeks.