F. W. Woolworth Company

» see woolworth.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Frank Winfield Woolworth opened a Great Five Cent Store in Utica, New York on 22 February 1879 and it failed inside three months. The second attempt, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania that June, worked. The idea underneath both was that goods should carry a marked price that nobody haggled over, laid out on open counters where a customer could pick them up and look at them, instead of being kept behind a counter and negotiated for. That sounds like nothing now because every shop on earth does it, and in 1879 it was a different way of selling entirely.

The chain grew by copying itself. In 1912 Woolworth merged 596 stores into a single company and took it public, and the following year he paid cash for a headquarters at 233 Broadway that was the tallest building in the world until 1930. The cash detail is the one people repeat: $13.5 million, no mortgage, from a business built on nickels. Stores went into Britain from 1909 and into Germany from 1926, each running as its own operation, which is why the name has a different life expectancy on every continent.

By the 1960s the five-and-dime format was already the past. The chain's own growth was coming from elsewhere, mostly from the Kinney Shoe Corporation it bought in 1963 and from Foot Locker, a mall format Kinney launched in 1974 that did better every year than the stores the company was named after. The variety stores kept their downtown leases while the customers moved out to the malls, and then to the big discounters, which sold the same category of goods with better buying power and free parking.

~ the case file ~

~ the lunch counter ~

On 1 February 1960, four students from North Carolina A&T sat down at the segregated lunch counter of the Woolworth on South Elm Street in Greensboro and ordered coffee. They were refused and they stayed. The sit-in ran for months and spread to dozens of cities, and the chain desegregated its Southern counters that July. A section of that counter is in the Smithsonian and the building itself is a civil rights museum. It is the single most consequential thing that ever happened inside a Woolworth, and it happened because the company had put a restaurant in every downtown in the country.

~ a graceful retirement ~

On 17 March 1997 the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped Woolworth and Bethlehem Steel on the same day, part of a four-name swap that brought Walmart onto the index. Four months later, on Thursday 17 July, the company announced it was closing all 400 remaining American five-and-dime stores and cutting 9,200 jobs, with the stock liquidated over roughly ninety days. Chairman Roger Farah called it a graceful retirement and promised severance and outplacement counseling, and said that keeping an unprofitable chain alive would put the rest of the corporation at risk.

He was describing an accounting fact rather than a sentiment. The corporation by then was Foot Locker with a historical attachment, and the attachment was costing money. On 12 June 1998 it renamed itself the Venator Group to get the word Woolworth off the letterhead, and on 20 October 2001 it renamed itself again to Foot Locker, Inc. That company is still listed and still trading, so the date on this stone is a store closure rather than a bankruptcy.

~ the name that kept trading ~

The British Woolworths outlived the American one by twelve years and died harder. Separated from the parent in 1982, it went through several owners before the debt caught up in the 2008 credit freeze, and the last 800 stores closed on 6 January 2009. In Britain the closure registered as a national event in a way the American one had not, partly because Woolworths was still a functioning high street habit there when it went.

The German operation is the awkward one for anybody writing an obituary. Woolworth Deutschland was sold to its management in 1998, went through its own insolvency in 2009, and now runs several hundred stores across Germany and into Poland. It has no corporate relationship to the dead American company beyond a licensed name and a shared ancestor. Searching the word today lands you on a live discount retailer with a full product catalog and a jobs page.

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