F.W. Woolworth invented the model that built modern mass retail — fixed low prices, open counters of goods you could touch, cash and carry, no haggling — and on July 17, 1997, after 118 years, the company announced it was closing the last of its American five-and-dime stores. Frank Winfield Woolworth opened his first “5-cent store” in Utica, New York, in February 1879; it failed within months, but the second, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, succeeded, and from it grew a chain that put a Woolworth’s on Main Street in nearly every town in America and, eventually, much of the world. Everything originally cost a nickel or a dime, displayed on open counters rather than kept behind a clerk, and the formula — high volume, low margin, buy direct, sell for cash — was so successful that by 1982 the company operated more than 8,000 stores worldwide and was, at its centennial in 1979, described as the largest department-store chain on earth.
The store was also, in 1960, the site of one of the most consequential acts of the American civil rights movement. On February 1, four Black college students sat down at the segregated lunch counter of the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, ordered coffee, and refused to leave when denied service. The Greensboro sit-ins spread across the South within weeks and helped force the desegregation of public accommodations. The lunch counter — Woolworth’s signature feature, the place a town came to eat — became, for once, the stage for something far larger than retail.
What killed Woolworth’s was the model it had pioneered, scaled up and turned against it. The whole logic of the five-and-dime was cheap, broad selection at fixed low prices, and that is precisely what Walmart, Kmart, and the other discount chains delivered in the second half of the century — bigger, cheaper, and with free parking, out where the highways and the malls were, while Woolworth’s stayed downtown in aging buildings as downtown itself emptied. By 1997 the US Woolworth’s stores were a small, money-losing fraction of a company that had long since diversified into specialty retail; the corporation closed the remaining roughly 400 of them, laid off about 9,200 workers, renamed itself Venator Group in 1998, and — having kept its profitable Foot Locker chain — became Foot Locker, Inc. in 2001. The five-and-dime that taught America how to shop quietly outlived its own name.
Bonwit Teller was one of New York’s great upscale specialty department stores — a name synonymous for most of the twentieth century with high-end women’s fashion, discreet service, and a Fifth Avenue address — and by 1990 it had been passed through so many owners that there was almost nothing left to close. The firm dated to 1895, when Paul Bonwit opened the store that the company always treated as its founding; Edmund D. Teller joined as partner soon after, and the business incorporated in 1907. From a series of Manhattan locations it built a reputation for taste and quality that put it in the same conversation as Bergdorf Goodman and Saks, and in 1929 it crowned that reputation with a celebrated Art Deco flagship on Fifth Avenue at 56th Street, an eleven-story building whose limestone reliefs of dancing nude figures became one of the avenue’s small architectural treasures.
The store’s most famous moment, however, was its destruction. In 1979 Bonwit Teller’s flagship building was sold, and the developer who bought the site, Donald Trump, demolished it in 1980 to build Trump Tower. The Art Deco friezes and the great decorative grille over the entrance — which Trump had publicly indicated would be salvaged and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art — were instead jackhammered to rubble during demolition, a widely condemned act that became the building’s epitaph. The store itself relocated to space within the new tower, but the demolition was the visible beginning of an invisible decline: the institution survived, diminished, while its most distinctive physical presence was reduced to rubble for a higher use of the land.
What actually finished Bonwit Teller was not a single dramatic failure but ownership churn — a luxury nameplate traded from one parent to the next, each with its own agenda, none able or willing to sustain it. Genesco, Allied Stores, and then the Australian developer L.J. Hooker each held it; Hooker, having paid around $101 million for the chain in 1987 and briefly expanded it, slid into bankruptcy in 1989, putting Bonwit on the auction block. In 1990 most of the stores — including the flagship in Trump Tower — were liquidated, and the name and a handful of locations passed to a mall developer, The Pyramid Company, which kept a shrunken remnant limping for another decade. By any meaningful measure the great Bonwit Teller closed in 1990, a casualty less of changing fashion than of having been owned by too many people who did not need it to exist.
Caldor was the discount department store that aspired to taste, and in 1999 it liquidated all the same. Carl and Dorothy Bennett founded it in 1951 with $8,000 of savings, opening a second-floor “Walk-Up-&-Save” loft in Port Chester, New York — the name a contraction of Caldor from Carl and Dorothy. From that walk-up it grew into one of the Northeast’s signature discounters, earning the affectionate label “the Bloomingdale’s of discounting” for stores that were cleaner, brighter, and better-merchandised than the typical bargain barn. By the time Carl Bennett retired in 1985, Caldor ran about 100 stores and topped $1 billion in sales, and at its mid-1990s peak it was the fourth-largest discount department-store chain in the country, with roughly 166 stores and sales approaching $2.8 billion.
The mechanism of death was the classic one for this file: a leveraged buyout, followed by debt-fueled overexpansion, into the teeth of Walmart and Target. Caldor had passed through corporate hands — Associated Dry Goods bought it in 1981 for $313 million, then May Department Stores inherited it in a 1986 merger — before May sold it in November 1990 to an investor group led by Odyssey Partners for about $500 million in cash plus assumed debt. The new owners took Caldor public again, paid down some debt, and kept expanding aggressively, even buying six former Alexander’s stores in 1992. But expansion costs money, the new stores underperformed, and the competition was Walmart, whose prices and scale a regional chain simply could not match.
The bill came due in September 1995, when Caldor filed for Chapter 11 with its stock collapsed from $32 to under $4. It spent more than three years trying to reorganize and failed; creditors opposed its plans, and in January 1999 management concluded there was no way to survive. On January 22, 1999 the chairman announced the company would liquidate; sales began across all 145 remaining stores the next day. By May 15, 1999 the last store had closed, and more than 20,000 employees were out of work. The Bloomingdale’s of discounting had been undone by acting less like Bloomingdale’s and more like every other overleveraged chain that grew too fast in front of Walmart.