What
99 cents store, Foot Locker and
skyscraper near City Hall in New York have in common?
Woolworth is the name that stand behind all these three objects.
Woolworth was the retail
phenomenon of the twentieth century. It was the first brand to go global,
building to more than 3,000 near-identical stores across the world.
Frank Winfield Woolworth was born in a small
town near Great Lakes. His father was a
farmer and he expected his son to help him milking the cows before school and picking potatoes by hand in
the evening.
Frank left school
at the age of sixteen to work full-time on the farm but he did not want to be a
farmer - he wanted to go to the night
school to learn bookkeeping. Frank wanted to try commerce. His mother gave Frank small allowance as
pocket money for his first three months and he started working in local General
Store. Frank had been working very hard unpaid for three months. After
first three months he got a job for $3.50 a
week. He was given responsibility for checking in
goods, keeping the stockroom tidy, and for setting up displays. He established
his own system and started to study the merchandise. He later recalled with pleasure that the older
ladies in-store liked to mother him, charmed by his bright blue eyes and cheeky
smile.
In 1878 Frank borrowed $300 and opened a
five-cent store in Utica, New York . It failed within weeks. Woolworth opened
his second store in April 1879, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he expanded
the concept to include merchandise priced at ten cents. Sales were $127.65 on
the first day.
In its 1940 series entitled “Dime Store,” the
Post recorded the inventory at Frank Woolworth’s store when it opened on
February 22, 1879. It included:
Toy
dustpans. Tin pepper boxes. Drinking cups. Gravy strainers. Tin scoops. Purses.
Biscuit cutters. Flour dredges. Schoolbook straps. Egg whips. Apple corers.
Fire shovels. Boot blacking. Animal-shaped soap. Animal-shaped Cake Cutters.
Candlesticks. Ladles. ABC plates [plates with the alphabet inscribed around the
rim]. Scalloped pie plates. Baseballs. Tack hammers. Writing books. Pencil charms. Shaving Lather brushes. Tin spoons. Police whistles. Pie plates. Red
jewelry. Napkins, handkerchiefs, thread, and novelties.
Frank opened a second branch in nearby Harrisburg,
managed by his brother. The
chain became very successful, mostly due
to a large influx of American immigrants attracted to the straightforward
discount pricing strategy.
In 1886 Woolworth moved to Brooklyn, New York,
to be near wholesale suppliers. He lived at 209 Jefferson Avenue in Bedford.
The first Brooklyn Woolworth store opened in Brooklyn, Fulton Street, in 1895.
The
Woolworth chain grew rapidly. By 1895
there were 28 stores, and sales reached the $1 million mark. Woolworth thought that the presentation of
goods is very important and he took the responsibility for planning window and
counter displays for the whole chain. He created red store front which became
its institutional hallmark.
The
success of the chain between 1890 and 1910 was phenomenal. By 1910 F.W. Woolworth and Company had nearly
three hundred Five and Ten Cent Stores, including branches on the up market
Ladies Mile, around 5th and 6th Avenue, in Manhattan, and seven branches in the
United Kingdom.
Woolworth's
opened its first British store in Liverpool in November 1909. It was a big
success. The three floor emporium was always packed with customers. It had
famously long lines.
By
1912, there were nearly 600 Woolworth’s stores around the United States and
Canada. That year, F.W Woolworth Co. had its initial public offering on the
NYSE. The proceeds were used primarily to fund the construction of the historic
Woolworth Building.
One
of the reasons for Woolworth’s success was a model that still works: importing
goods from foreign markets with cheap labor. At that time it mean: Europe. On a buying trip in Germany, Woolworth wrote:
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. Some of the women in America think they have got hard work to do, but it
is far different than the poor women here, that work night and day on toys, and
strap them onto their backs, and go 10 or 20 miles through the mud with 75
pounds on their backs, to sell them.
Woolworths
had dozens of outlets across the US by the time it arrived on British shores,
and its owner had already made his fortune . The chain become a quintessentially British
institution, with a presence on almost every high street and a unique place in
the hearts of the nation's shoppers.
For
forty years Frank led Woolworth's from the front. He was the first to
introduce different staff benefits. Employees
had seek days. There was a fund
that made payouts for medical treatment and emergencies. Employees also
had paid holidays and generous Christmas
bonuses.
Frank
Woolworth fell ill as he prepared
elaborate fortieth birthday celebrations for Woolworths. He died on Tuesday 8
April 1919, just four days after leaving his desk for the last time. The
obituary in the New York Times said
that 'he made his money not by selling a little for a lot, but by selling a lot
for a little'.
It’s
just as surprising that the store could keep its shelves stocked only with 5¢
and 10¢ items for 55 years! By the 1930s, though, the store had bowed to
inflation by allowing 20¢ as the top price they could charge.
By
Woolworth’s 100th anniversary (1952) Woolworth had become the largest department store chain
in the world, according to the Guinness Book of World Record. The Woolworth
chain continued to prosper. As late as 1979, Woolworth, with its subsidiary
Woolco, operated 800 stores.
In
1963, F.W. Woolworth Company purchased the Kinney Shoe Corporation, which
ultimately branched into specialty shoe stores, including Foot Locker in 1974. The
increased competition led to its decline beginning in the 1980s. On March 17, 1997, Wal-Mart replaced
Woolworth's as a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. On Jul 17,
1997 The Woolworth Corporation said that it
would shutter all 400 of its remaining five-and-dime stores. It was the end of
Woolworth Empire.
Retail
chains using the Woolworth name survive in Austria, Germany, Mexico and, until
the start of 2009, the United Kingdom.
The Time Warner Center is located on Columbus Circle at the southwest
corner of Central Park. It is the first
major building to be completed in Manhattan after the September 11, 2001. The
buildings consists of two 80 story towers with
a bridge like atrium between them. Its
scale is huge: a $1.7 billion investment bringing a major upscale shopping
mall, a 5-star hotel, offices for 1,700 Time Warner employees and other
companies, television studios, a jazz concert hall, residential apartments and
more... The Shops at Columbus Circle represent some of the finest shopping in
New York City. You can read the story
about the complex here. 
As soon as you walk into the Time Warner Center you are
confronted by this very large couple who are not shy and clearly here to shop
for some designer clothing. The
twelve-foot statues were created by the Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Fernando Botero was born in 1932 in Colombia .
In 1944 he took bullfighting classes with his uncle at La Macarena, the
Medellin bullfighting ring. After a close call with a bull, Fernando decided to
give up bullfighting and focus on what most interested him as a child:
painting. 
