Game Changers: Woolworth's, which folded 20 years ago, sparked a retail revolution

In Memoriam: F.W. Woolworth's

Departed this Earth: July 17, 1997

A "C" with a slash through it — remember that? It means "cent."

We describe it only because we can't print it. It's not on any computer keyboard.

Nor will you find it, these days, in advertisements or supermarket circulars. As a symbol, it's as retro as what it represents. Nickels and dimes? They're the things we leave in the change tray, or discover at the bottom of the washing machine. Next to useless.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

But before the F. W. Woolworth Co. officially went out of business — 20 years ago this month, on July 17, 1997 — that "c," for cent, could still be seen on a few of the signs above the big show windows that proudly proclaimed "F.W. Woolworth 5 &10 c store." The first Woolworth's, which opened in Utica , N.Y., in 1878, was a game-changer. So was the disappearance of the 807 remaining stores in the chain,119 years later.

"It was an inexpensive department store that had everything," says Candace Latham, board president of the Ridgewood Historical Society, who shopped at the town's Woolworth. "I remember getting paper, little hardware-y kinds of stuff. Nails. A picture frame."

Hackensack, Bergenfield, Englewood, Closter, Pompton Lakes, Rutherford, Paterson, and Teaneck were among the many other North Jersey towns that had one of these sprawling stores, known informally as "five and dimes." And back in the heyday of Woolworth's, those nickels and dimes could be very useful indeed.

They could buy drinking cups, candlesticks, pie plates, napkins, biscuit cutters, charm bracelets, apple corers, shoe polish, costume jewelry, tack hammers, socks, blouses, dustpans, pepper boxes, spoons, dishes, whistles, baseballs, tops, marbles, dolls and wind-up toys.

They could also buy the world's biggest skyscraper.

When Frank Winfield Woolworth, who founded the chain, had grown rich enough to build the world's tallest building in 1913, he famously paid for it in cash — a total of $13.5 million for the building and the block on lower Broadway in Manhattan where it still stands. A statue inside the 58-story Woolworth Building (the world's tallest skyscraper until 1930, and still one of the most beautiful) shows the tycoon counting the nickels and dimes from his faithful customers that paid for his "Cathedral of Commerce."

"All these little nickels and dimes paid for this big, giant, beautiful building," says Vincent Parrillo, a sociology professor at William Paterson University in Wayne. "That idea was part of what made it iconic."

His own local Woolworth's, in Paterson, was the site of weekly pilgrimages when he was a 10-year-old in the early 1950s, looking for ways to spend his allowance (50 cents, he recalls).

"We were always in Woolworth's looking for something," Parrillo recalls. "It would be toy soldiers, or a rubber ball to play stickball. You went to Woolworth's to get most of the stuff that as a kid you could afford. The store was an institution. It even served as a landmark. You would say, 'It's downtown, by Woolworth's.'"

Woolworth's was a watershed in many ways. Not just because it spawned myriad imitators (Kresge, McCrory, Kress), or because it's the ancestor of the "dollar stores" that can be seen today in many less-upscale strip malls.

Game Changers:An airship revival 80 years after the Hindenburg?

Game Changers:Steampunk turns 30

Game Changers:Graceland

Woolworth brought shopping to the masses.

That's "shopping," as opposed to "going to the store," something that even the poorest did when they needed a loaf of bread or a couple of penny nails. "Shopping," as everybody knows, is a leisure activity — and was from the moment the first department store opened in New York in 1825.  But for a long time, it was something only the well-off could afford to do. Until Woolworth.

He did it partly by his pricing policy — until 1932, everything in the store was literally five or 10 cents. But he also did it by an innovation in sales.

All the merchandise at Woolworth's was laid out on tables and in bins for the public to inspect at leisure. Customers — many, frankly, from lower income brackets, and liable to be self-conscious about it — no longer had to risk humiliation by asking a snooty sales clerk to take something down from the shelf.

"It encouraged impulse buying," says Angus Kress Gillespie, a professor of American Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. "You don't have to ask for it, you just grab it. It probably also led to employing store detectives."

Catering to 'strivers'

Woolworth's catered to a demographic that barely exists today: the thrifty, "respectable" lower-middle class, the strivers that many of our parents were. These were the days before credit cards, when a penny saved was a penny earned. Shoppers 100 years ago could indulge themselves to the extent of a nickel (about 75 cents in today's money) or dime, without feeling too guilty. 

In "Alice Adams" (1935), Katharine Hepburn plays a wistful social climber from a modest background who wants to get in with her town's smart set. How did the filmmakers show that she was batting out of her league? The movie's first image nails it: she's seen, with a new makeup compact, coming out of the Five and Ten.

That's the kind of person who shopped at Woolworth's.

"Woolworth," by the 1930s, had become synonymous with "cheap," just as "Tiffany" meant high-class. As a popular song had it: "Gee, I 'd like to see you lookin' swell, baby — Diamond bracelets Woolworth doesn't sell, baby."  But it wasn't cheapness with a stigma. This was the Depression, after all, and nobody had money.  

Unlike today's sometimes-grubby dollar stores, Woolworth stores were clean, well lighted places, where you could get a ham sandwich for 15 cents at the lunch counter, or buy a tiny turtle complete with plastic palm tree in the pet department. And Woolworth was popular, not only in the United States but also across much of Europe.

In England, Five and Dimes were known as "Three and Sixes" (as in, three and sixpence). "One of their best lines was their rose bushes," George Orwell recalled in 1944, when he was writing "Animal Farm." This was, he said, "in good old days when nothing in Woolworth's cost over sixpence." Years later another Brit, David Bowie, described his Ziggy Stardust character as "Nijinsky meets Woolworth's."

A civil rights fault line

Nowhere was the unique class niche of Woolworth's more evident than in its most notorious episode: the February 1960 sit-ins by civil rights activists in Greensboro, N.C.

Four black students deliberately sat at a segregated lunch counter at the town's Woolworth's and ordered coffee. They were refused service. The protests escalated in coming days to include hundreds of activists, and later spread to other five and dimes, including a Kress in Greensboro. (The Greensboro Woolworth is now the site of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.)

Why Woolworth? The protesters might have chosen any local business and made the same point: segregation wasn't in short supply in 1960 Greensboro.

But Woolworth, for both sides of this struggle, may have represented a fault line. The very humbleness, the everyday-ness of Woolworth's, was the point. It was democracy's lowest bar.

"We can't even go into Woolworth's and get a cup of coffee" was the activists' unspoken message. For the white resistance, many of them blue collar (or they wouldn't be shopping at Woolworth's), it might have seemed the last straw; they could no longer even call the lunch counter at the five-and-dime their "own."

"The protesters weren't asking to be admitted to the country club, just asking to go to the dime store.'" Gillespie says. "It's a modest request, and if it's denied, that speaks to American racism."

The class-baggage of Woolworth's may be one of the factors that doomed it by the 1990s. (Foot Locker Inc. is the company's successor.)

As we've all been reading, America's middle class is shrinking. More importantly, fewer people want to identify as middle or lower-middle class — that is to say, the kind of person who shops at Woolworth's.

"There's this pretension, this 'I'm above that kind of thing' attitude," Parrillo says. "You wouldn't want to be seen in a dime store."

About the series

Game Changers is an ongoing series about the turning points in pop culture.