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ROW #535 · LEG 81 ITEM 3 · TESTED NEGATIVE (Osceola seat) / DUG (pattern, boundary)
The pattern is real, it is this county's, and it is South Bend's — not Osceola's. Tire Rack, the register's own pattern firm, was founded in 1979 by Peter "Pete" Veldman with his son-in-law Mike Joines, began as a retail tire store, added mail order within three years, closed the retail store by 1990 to concentrate on mail order and then online sales, put up its website in 1995 to post tire reviews, began online sales in 1998, and grew into the world's largest online tire and wheel seller, headquartered in South Bend; Discount Tire acquired it in a transaction announced December 3, 2021 and closed December 31, 2021, keeping the brand and the South Bend headquarters. Every one of those facts seats in South Bend (the founding store's Indianapolis line in the acquisition release is that release's own wording and is not adopted here against the South Bend record). None seats in Osceola.
Against that pattern the Osceola test was run whole: the banked Businesses census of seated commerce — hardware, used cars, the modern creamery, the gazetteer firms of 1884–85 and 1916–17 — contains no firm that sold online and stayed, and web searches for an Osceola, Indiana e-commerce firm, founding to present, return no such firm. Closure: TESTED NEGATIVE at town size. Osceola's homegrown winner does not exist in the record reached; its county's winner is printed above at boundary size so the pattern is honored without importing the credit.
Sources:
- Tire Rack history (Wikipedia, sourced to company and press record) — founded 1979; website 1995; online sales 1998.
- Racer / Tire Review, March 2014 — Veldman obituary; South Bend founding; mail-order pivot; retail closure by 1990.
- PR Newswire / Building Indiana, December 3, 2021 — Discount Tire acquisition of Tire Rack; headquarters maintained in South Bend.
- Banked Businesses — the Osceola seated-commerce census, read whole.