Woolworth's

Frank W. Woolworth opened his Great Five Cent Store in Utica, New York, on February 22, 1879. It failed in three months. The second attempt, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that June, worked, and the five-and-ten model that grew out of it changed how Americans shopped: Woolworth's was among the first retailers to put goods out where customers could pick them up instead of asking a clerk, and it held to nickel-and-dime prices until 1932. The chain paid cash for the Woolworth Building in New York, the world's tallest when it opened in 1913, and its lunch counters became downtown gathering places. The one in Greensboro, North Carolina, was the site of the 1960 sit-ins.

By the 1990s the stores were a ritual for the last time. The last generation of kids knew Woolworth's as the place downtown or in the older mall that still sold sewing supplies, greeting cards and dishes and served hot dogs and soft drinks at the counter, while the company itself had been drifting elsewhere for decades. It launched the Woolco discount chain in 1962, the same year Kmart, Target and Walmart opened, and closed it in the U.S. in 1983. It bought Kinney Shoes in 1963, spun Foot Locker out of Kinney in 1974, and the sneaker business increasingly paid the bills. In October 1993 it announced it would close half of its 800-odd U.S. general-merchandise stores.

The end came fast. On March 17, 1997, Wal-Mart replaced Woolworth in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. On July 17 the company announced it was closing its remaining 400 U.S. stores and laying off 9,200 people; five years earlier it had run 1,465. The general-merchandise stores had lost $37 million the previous year on about a billion dollars of the corporation's eight billion in sales. CEO Roger Farah said that "despite our best efforts and the hard work of the F.W. Woolworth team, the business continued to lose money," and retail consultant Kurt Barnard called Woolworth "the last of the five-and-dime stores." A Virginia Beach shopper who came in to look one more time told the Virginian-Pilot she had bought her first china at a Woolworth: "It's kind of sad, like part of the family is gone."

The corporation renamed itself Venator Group in 1998, sold the Woolworth Building the same year, and in 2001 took the name of its best performer: Foot Locker, Inc.