A five-cent counter and a store in Lancaster.

The F. W. Woolworth Company grew from an idea about price. According to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission’s 1983 designation report on the Woolworth Building, Frank Winfield Woolworth was working at Augsbury & Moore, a dry-goods store in Watertown, New York, when in 1878 a visitor told the store a story about a counter on which everything sold for five cents. Moore, his employer, was sceptical, the report says, but later that year bought a stock of nickel goods and sold all of it in a day. Woolworth decided to build a business that dealt only in such goods.

His first attempt, a “Great Five Cent Store” in Utica, New York, opened in February 1879, English Wikipedia says, and closed within months; the commission’s report says simply that it met with little success. He moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and widened the range to include ten-cent items. The commission dates the Lancaster opening to 6 June 1879 and gives the shop’s name as “Woolworth’s 5 and 10 Cent Store”; English Wikipedia gives 21 June 1879. The Associated Press, reporting in July 1997, dated the company’s founding to 1879 in Lancaster.

The method mattered as much as the price. Woolworth’s plan, in the commission’s words, was to find articles that could be sold for either a nickel or a dime, display them on counters and let customers choose their own merchandise, saving the cost of salespeople. Stores in Harrisburg and York did not succeed; one in Scranton, opened in 1880 and run by his brother Charles Sumner Woolworth, did, and the business became the “Woolworth Bros. 5 and 10 Cent Store.” The commission records that Woolworth moved to New York in 1886 to be near his suppliers, made his first buying trip to Europe in 1890 and took the stores to England in 1909.

The corporate name joined several businesses into one. The commission says that in 1910 Woolworth merged his company with those of several competitors to form the F. W. Woolworth Company; English Wikipedia dates the merger of the affiliated chains to 1912. The stores, the Associated Press wrote in 1997, boomed in prewar downtowns and became fixtures in suburban strip shopping centres.

The Cathedral of Commerce.

Much of the company’s public image was carried by a building. Woolworth began planning a new headquarters in 1910, the commission says, and the Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway in Lower Manhattan went up between 1911 and 1913 to designs by the architect Cass Gilbert: a Gothic-style tower clad in terra-cotta. The report describes it as built as the headquarters of Woolworth’s “five-and-ten” business and as a symbol of the new twentieth-century phenomenon of mass commerce.

Its opening was staged as an event. According to the report, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button in Washington to signal the lighting of the building in New York, and the preacher S. Parkes Cadman christened it the “Cathedral of Commerce.” The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated it a New York City landmark on 12 April 1983. English Wikipedia says it remained the company’s headquarters until the company, by then renamed, sold it in 1998.

The store itself was the other half of the identity. The Associated Press, writing in 1997, called Woolworth “the anchor of Main Street,” where generations went for a thimble, a mop or a bite to eat, and recorded that rivals such as McCrory and Ben Franklin copied its mix of merchandise under one roof. English Wikipedia says the company kept for many years to a strict five-and-ten-cent business, adding a 20-cent line in 1932 and dropping price limits altogether in 1935, and that its stores added lunch counters. In 1960, the Associated Press recalled in 1997, four Black students were denied service at the lunch counter of the Greensboro, North Carolina, store, and Woolworth changed its practice that year.

The company also built other names. It opened its own discount chain, Woolco, in 1962, the Associated Press reported, and in 1974 it established Foot Locker, a chain of athletic-shoe shops, The Guardian reported in 2012; English Wikipedia says Foot Locker grew out of the Kinney Shoe business that Woolworth bought in 1963. English Wikipedia adds that in the 1980s the company opened specialty chains for shopping malls, among them Afterthoughts, Northern Reflections and Champs Sports, alongside a smaller mall version of its variety store called Woolworth Express.

Design and documentation.

A discount or variety store’s identity is carried by things that are easy to overlook because they were made to be used and thrown away: the sign above the entrance, the weekly circular folded into a newspaper, the receipt, the price card on the shelf and the shopping bag a customer carries out of the car park. Each of these repeats the store’s name many times a week, often for decades, and together they do more to fix a chain in local memory than any single logo drawing.

Signage had to be read from a road and a parking lot, so store names were usually set large, short and in one or two strong colours. Circulars had a different job: crowding many items onto cheap paper while keeping the name and colours instantly recognisable on a doorstep or kitchen table. Bags travelled furthest of all, into homes, schools and other shops.

Each guide in this group looks at one store name — who founded it, who owned it, what became of the stores and of the name itself — and separates what independent sources record from what the companies said about themselves.

From five-and-ten to Foot Locker.

The American variety stores did not survive the century. On 17 July 1997 Woolworth Corporation announced that it would close its remaining five-and-dime stores in the United States, the Associated Press reported the next day; its chairman and chief executive, Roger Farah, said the chain would be unable to return to profitability in the foreseeable future, and the company said it would concentrate on Foot Locker, Champs Sports and its other shops, converting some of the closed stores to those names. In April 1998 the Associated Press reported that the company would rename itself Venator Group — Latin for “sportsman” or “hunter” — on 12 June, with each operating unit keeping its own name. English Wikipedia says the company took the name Foot Locker, Inc. in 2001 and remains the legal continuation of the original Woolworth. In September 2025 Dick’s Sporting Goods completed its acquisition of Foot Locker, Inc., Retail & Restaurant Facility Business reported.

The name lived on abroad in other hands. When the American closures were announced, the Associated Press noted, the remaining Woolworth stores were in Germany and Mexico. English Wikipedia says the German business has operated independently since 1998 and holds the Woolworth trademark rights in continental Europe, and that the Mexican chain was sold in December 1997. The Woolworths supermarkets of Australia and the Woolworths stores of South Africa are separate businesses that were never part of the American company, English Wikipedia says. In New York, the Broadway tower remains a designated city landmark.

For a design guide, Woolworth shows how a price could become a name, and how a headquarters could serve as a store brand’s sign. Compare Macy’s, another New York retail name with a long public identity, and Montgomery Ward, the Chicago catalogue house whose stores also closed. For this guide we use a dime-store red, a gilt and a terra-cotta with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Woolworth’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.