The story
Founded by Frank Winfield Woolworth in 1878.1
Origins of F. W. Woolworth Company
The F. W. Woolworth Co. had the first five-and-dime stores, which sold discounted general merchandise and fixed price, usually five or ten cents, undercutting the prices of other local merchants. Woolworth, as the stores popularly became known, was one of the first American retailers to put merchandise out for the shopping public to handle and select without the assistance of a sales clerk. Earlier retailers had kept all merchandise behind a counter and customers presented the clerk with a list of items they wished to buy.
After working in Augsbury and Moore dry goods store in Watertown, New York, Frank Winfield Woolworth obtained credit from his former boss, William Moore, along with some savings, to buy merchandise and open the "Woolworth's Great Five Cent Store" in Utica, New York, on February 22, 1879. The store failed and closed in May 1879, after Woolworth earned enough money to pay back William Moore. Woolworth soon made a second attempt, and opened his "Woolworth's Great Five Cent Store", using the same sign, on June 21, 1879, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Lancaster proved a success, and Woolworth opened a second store in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1879, with his brother Charles Sumner Woolworth as manager. The Harrisburg store closed after a falling-out with the landlord; their next store, in York, Pennsylvania, likewise closed after only three months of operation. Finally, the "5¢ Woolworth Bros. Store" opened in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on November 6, 1880, with Charles as manager. At this location, the "5¢ & 10¢" merchandising model was fully developed, and the store proved a success. Charles bought out Frank's share of the Scranton store in two installments, in January 1881 and 1882, making him the company's first franchisee.
In 1884, Charles partnered with his longtime friend, wholesaler Fred Morgan Kirby, on a location in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, which they called "Woolworth and Kirby". This location, too, was successful, and the brothers continued persuading family members and other associates to join them in forming a "friendly rival syndicate" of five-and-ten-cent stores. Each of the syndicate chain's stores looked similar inside and out, but operated under its founder's name. Frank Woolworth provided much of the merchandise, encouraging the rivals to club together to maximize their inventory and purchasing power.
Rise and expansion
By 1904, the syndicate had six chains of affiliated stores operating in the United States and Canada, which began incorporating separately during the next few years. In 1912, however, all 596 stores merged into one corporate entity under the name "F. W. Woolworth Company", which was then incorporated on February 16, 1905. Frank Woolworth served as president; Charles Woolworth, Fred Kirby, Seymour H. Knox I, Earle Charlton, and William Moore each became a director and vice president.
In 1900, Frank Woolworth bought up adjoining properties in a low-rent area of Lancaster. On the newly acquired land, he had a building erected with five floors of offices above a large store, as well as a garden and open-air theater, which soon became the city's social center.
In 1910, Frank Woolworth commissioned the design and construction of the Woolworth Building in New York City. A pioneering early skyscraper, it was designed by American architect Cass Gilbert, a graduate of the MIT architecture school. The building was paid for entirely in cash. It was completed in 1913 and was the tallest building in the world until 1930. It also served as the company's headquarters until the F. W. Woolworth Company's successor, the Venator Group (now Foot Locker), sold it in 1998.
After Frank Woolworth's 1919 death, his brother Charles took on the role of chairman of the board, and the company's treasurer Hubert T. Parson took over the presidency.
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In 1925, the company reported $253 million in sales; in 1926, $239 million.
For many years the company did a strictly "five-and-ten cent" business, but in the spring of 1932 it added a 20-cent line of merchandise. On November 13, 1935, the company's directors decided to discontinue selling-price limits altogether.
The stores eventually incorporated lunch counters after the success of the counters in the first store in the UK in Liverpool. These counters served as general gathering places, a precursor to the modern shopping mall food court. A Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, became the setting for the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins, protesting the company's racial segregation policies in the South, a key event of the Civil Rights Movement.
The Woolworth's concept was widely imitated, and five-and-ten-cent stores (also known as five-and-dime stores or dimestores) became a 20th-century fixture in American downtowns. They would serve as anchors for suburban shopping plazas and shopping malls in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Criticisms that five-and-dime stores drove local merchants out of business would repeat themselves in the early 21st century, when big-box discount stores became popular.
Diversifications
In the 1960s, the five-and-dime concept evolved into the larger discount department store format. In 1962, Woolworth's founded a chain of large, single-floor discount stores called Woolco. In that same year, Woolworth's competitors opened similar retail chains that sold merchandise at a discount: the S.S. Kresge Company opened Kmart, Dayton's opened Target, and Sam Walton opened his first Wal-Mart store.
The following year, in 1963, Woolworth expanded into the shoe store business with the purchase of Kinney Shoe Corporation, which led to the founding of the sporting goods store Foot Locker in 1974; the company would specialise in sporting goods and exclusively focus on sporting goods by 2001.
By Woolworth's 100th anniversary in 1979, it had become the largest department store chain in the world, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
During the 1980s, the company began expansion into many different specialty store formats, including Afterthoughts (which sold jewelry and other accessories for women), Northern Reflections (which sold cold-weather outerwear), Rx Place (later sold to Phar-Mor), and Champs Sports.
By 1989, the company was pursuing an aggressive strategy of multiple specialty store formats targeted at enclosed shopping malls. The idea was that if a particular concept failed at a given mall, the company could quickly replace it with a different concept. The company aimed for ten stores in each of the country's major shopping malls, but this never came to pass, as Woolworth never developed that many successful specialty store formats.
Also attempted was a revision of the classic Woolworth store model into Woolworth Express, a small, mall-oriented variant which was dubbed "a specialty variety store'', stocked with everyday convenience items such as health and beauty aids, greeting cards, snack foods, cleaning supplies and school supplies (somewhat like the non-pharmacy, mall-based locations of CVS/pharmacy and other drug store chains).
Decline
The growth and expansion of the company contributed to its downfall. The Woolworth company moved away from its five-and-dime roots and placed less emphasis on its department store chain as it focused on its specialty stores. Still, the company was unable to compete with other chains that had eroded its market share.
While it was a success in Canada, the Woolco chain closed in the United States in 1983. Europe's largest F. W. Woolworth store, in Manchester, England (one of two in the city centre), suffered a fire in May 1979. Despite the store being rebuilt even larger and up to the latest fire codes, the negative stories in the press and loss of lives in the fire sealed its fate; it ultimately closed in 1986. During the rebuilding and partly as a result of the bad press, the British operation was separated from the parent company as Woolworths plc. This proved fortuitous, as the brand subsequently lasted a full twelve years longer in the United Kingdom than it did in the United States.
On October 15, 1993, Woolworth's embarked on a restructuring plan that included closing half of its 800-plus general merchandise stores in the United States and converting its Canadian stores to a closeout division named The Bargain! Shop. Woolco and Woolworth survived in Canada until 1994, when the company sold the majority of the Woolco stores to Wal-Mart. The Woolco stores that Wal-Mart did not purchase were either converted to The Bargain! Shop, sold to Zellers or closed permanently. Approximately 100 Woolworth stores in Canada were rebranded as The Bargain! Shop, and the remainder closed.
Amid the decline of the signature stores, Woolworth began focusing on the sale of athletic goods. On January 30, 1997, the company acquired the mail order catalog athletic retailer Eastbay.
On March 17, 1997, Wal-Mart replaced Woolworth's as a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Analysts at the time cited the lower prices of the large discount stores and the expansion of supermarket grocery stores – which had begun to stock merchandise also sold by five-and-dime stores – as contributors to Woolworth's decline in the late 20th century. Woolworth's announced that same year it would be closing its remaining department stores in the United States on July 17.
Rebranding and epilogue
After the closure of its department stores, F. W. Woolworth Company had changed its corporate name to Venator Group, Inc. on June 12, 1998. The name "Venator" means "sportsman" in Latin. In 1999, Venator moved from the Woolworth Building in New York City to offices on 34th Street. Then on October 20, 2001, after selling off its non-athletic business (including a number of Burger King franchises), the company changed names again; taking the name of its top retail performer and became Foot Locker, Inc., which Woolworth started in 1974 under Kinney Shoes. Foot Locker, Inc., is the legal continuation of the original Woolworth; it retains Woolworth's pre-1997 stock price history.
As part of celebrating F. W. Woolworth's centennial on the New York Stock Exchange on June 26, 2012, a news release featured a 1912 Woolworth's store and a 2012 Foot Locker store.
In 2023, Foot Locker announced plan to close up to 400 low performing stores by 2026. Some of them were once Woolworth's.
On May 15, 2025, Dick's Sporting Goods, a sporting good store and rival to Foot Locker, announced that it would acquire the Foot Locker, Inc. company as well as its brands, including Foot Locker, for $2.4 billion.
From Wikipedia’s article on Woolworth, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4