![]() It is no longer a mystery to me how they make dolls and toys so cheap, for most of it is done by women and children at their homes anywhere within 20 miles of this place. On a buying trip in Germany, Woolworth noted, Woolworth believed that candy, alone, would pay the rent on each store.Īnother reason for Woolworth’s success was a model that still works: importing goods from foreign markets with cheap labor. “I don’t pretend to know much about the candy business, but, in my opinion, if you want to make a big success of candy, put it in brass trays and put it up near the door, so that people can be reminded of it as they are passing out and take some home to the children. ![]() Right after the Fourth of July in 1890, Woolworth complained: “One of the stores wrote me they sold firecrackers for 3 cents and some of the large ones at 15 cents per bunch, and, in my opinion, was all wrong, as it is getting off the idea of strictly 5 and 10 cents business- Stick to the original idea.”Ĭandy sales were particularly important to Woolworth’s success. One of the secrets for his success, Woolworth believed, was the attraction of five-cent and, eventually, ten-cent pricing. Thirty-four years after opening his first store, he moved into his office in the new Woolworth Building in New York City- the tallest building in the world (until surpassed by the Chrysler Building in 1930.) ![]() She was the first customer, and he served her without premonition of the vast tide of humanity which was to follow her.įrank was young enough to see his Five Cent Stores become a nationwide chain. On the evening before his scheduled opening, there was a knock at his store door. Napkins, handkerchiefs, thread, and novelties. In its 1940 series entitled “Dime Store,” the Post recorded the inventory at Frank Woolworth’s store when it opened on February 22, 1879. The idea had already proved itself in Michigan and western New York, where merchants had sold mass-produced, low-cost household goods in “nickel stores.” ![]() There was little indication of this future greatness when Frank Woolworth opened his Great Five Cent Store in Utica, New York. As late as 1979, Woolworth, with its subsidiary Woolco, operated 800 stores, making it the largest department store chain in the world. The Woolworth chain continued to prosper. So Woolworth abandoned the five-and-dime policy. It proved a fortunate, if regretted, move. Even this adjustment proved too restrictive. It’s just as surprising that the store could keep its shelves stocked only with 5¢ and 10¢ items for 55 years.īy the 1930s, though, the store had bowed to inflation by allowing 20¢ as the top price they could charge. It was the store’s rigid pricing policy: a nickel or dime would buy any item in the store. ![]() It may surprise many Americans who grew up at five-and-ten stores that the store name wasn’t just meant to connote inexpensive merchandise. ‘Resolved that the selling-price limit of twenty cents on merchandise be discontinued.’ Five and ten and fifteen cent turkey dinner. On that fateful day, the board passed the following resolution: The action they took was designed to engineer the company into merchandising more profitably than the price-restricted field of five-and-ten.” The occasion was a meeting of the board of directors of the F. “The five-and-ten, as an American institution, came to a quiet end on November 13, 1935. In fact, the five-and-dime store had already passed away forty years earlier. Woolworth Company ended 118 years in the discount retail business. The “five-and-ten store” officially departed the American landscape in 1997. ![]()
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