Grandma's Woolworth's

Grandma would take me to Woolworth's on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn to buy something with the dollar she gave me. Most of the time I refused my allowance telling her "She needed the money." My mother always worried about money so I assumed we would be out on the street at any minute. I would fill small sandwich bags with nickels pennies and dimes in my bedroom closet. Grandma bought lipstick at Woolworth's to cheer up. Her mirrored vanity drawers were was filled with them. There were all shades of pink and red and even white along with curlers and hair pins, eye liner, and mascara.

It was on this day in 1879 in Utica, New York, that Frank Winfield Woolworth opened his first five-and-dime store in a one-room shop on Bleecker Street. The room was 13 feet wide by 20 feet deep and the rent was $35.00 a month. He called his store “The Great Five Cent Store,” and everything inside was only five or ten cents. Woolworth promised that just a nickel or a dime would buy anything in the store, and he sold gravy strainers, purses, biscuit cutters, candlesticks, pie plates, boot blacking, baseballs, pencil charms, and police whistles. One woman was so excited that she showed up the night before, knocked on the door, and asked to buy a five-cent fire shovel. Frank Winfield Woolworth sold her one.

F.W. Woolworth was born in Rodman, New York (1852). Once, when he was a child, he and his brother traveled into Watertown to buy a birthday present for their mother. They’d saved 50 cents and were quite proud, but when they decided to buy a silk scarf in one store, the salesperson mocked them for paying in loose change and urged them to save up more money and buy a proper gift the next year. Woolworth never forgot that. When he decided to open his own store as an adult, he vowed that people would be able to buy many things for just 50 cents, not just one or two items, and that his customers would be treated equally, whether rich or poor.

Later, after Woolworth’s became an international chain, with more than 1,000 stores across the world, the New York Sun said of Woolworth, “He won a fortune not in showing how little could be sold for much, but how much could be sold for little.”