American Furniture Warehouse (AFW) is a privately held furniture retailer headquartered at Meridian, Colorado. It was founded in 1975 by entrepreneur Jake Jabs in a former American Furniture Co. store location at 58th Avenue and Bannock in Denver, Colorado.[1] As of 2010 AFW has 11 locations, all of them in Colorado.
AFW is well known in the Front Range area as Colorado's largest furniture retailer and for its frequent advertisements featuring founder Jake Jabs and animals. His local fame is such that Jabs was featured, along with Ron Zappolo, Tom Shane, and Jay Cutler, in the cartoon South Park season 11 episode entitled 'Guitar Queer-o' as a 'celebrity'.[2]
Jake Jabs' self-published autobiography 'An American Tiger' was panned by local weekly newspaper Westword when it was released in 2001 as "overstuffed" with "dozens of pages from his American Furniture Warehouse customer-service and employee policies."[3]
In 2003 American Furniture Warehouse Co. and Value City declared they would no longer buy bedroom sets from companies whose executives signed a petition charging China with illegally dumping cheap furniture in the United States including Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co., Hooker Furniture Corp., and La-Z-Boy Inc.[4]