The Story of Woolworth Five and Dime

 By Bruce Shawkey

As singer Nancy Griffith tells it, she learned there were Woolworth stores all over the United States, which inspired her song, Love at the Five and Dime.

The so got me interested in Woolworths. We had one on the Square in Madison. I remember it well. It had a lunch counter in addition to the dry-good store. I used to shop there for Xmas presents.

Found this book on the Internet which had a story authored by Dale Carnegie on the history of Woolworths. It is a true rags-to-riches story, reminiscent of the old Horatio Alger stories. Here it is, paraphrased below.

By Dale Carnegie

Every time you spend a nickel in one of Woolworth's five and ten cent stores, a part of your nickel finds its way eventually into the account of  Frank Winfield Woolworth (above).

How did he make his millions? He started out poor. He lived on a farm up near Watertown, New York, and he was so hard up that he had to go barefooted six months out of the year.

That poverty did big things for him. It aroused his ambition and filled him with a flaming desire to get ahead. He hated the farm and determined to be a storekeeper; so when he was 21 years of age, he hitched an old mare to a sleigh, drove into Carthage, New York, and applied for a job in every store in town. But nobody would hire him. He was too green, too gawky and hay-seedy.

Finally, he found a railway station agent who was running a sort of a store on the side. This station agent kept a stock of groceries in a freight shed, and Frank Woolworth worked for him for nothing — just in order to get experience.

Later on, he got a job working for a dry goods store. Although he was 21 years of age, his employers didn't feel he had enough sense to wait on customers, so they made him come down early of a morning, start a fire, sweep out the store, wash windows and deliver packages. And he wasn't allowed to sell goods at all except during the rush hour at noon.

As for salary, his bosses didn't want to pay him anything at all for the first six months. So he told them he had saved fifty dollars during his last ten years on the farm and that that was all the money he had in the world — but he agreed to live on that for the first three months if they would agree to pay him fifty cents a day from then on. When he did get his fifty cents a day, he had to work fifteen hours a day for it — so it figured out to about three cents an hour.

Finally, he got a job in another store at ten dollars a week; and he slept in the basement with a revolver under his pillow to protect the store from thieves. This place proved to be a nightmare. His employer hounded him and scolded him and told him he was no good and cut his salary and threatened to fire him. Frank Woolworth was a whipped man. Realizing he could never make good, he went back to the farm, suffered a nervous breakdown, and for a year, he couldn't do a stroke of work.

Think of it! This man who was destined to become the greatest retail merchant on earth, was so discouraged then that he abandoned all thought of trying to get ahead in business, and started raising chickens.

Then, one day, to his great surprise, one of his former employers sent for him and offered him a job. It was a bitter cold day in March of 1878. The ground was covered with three feet of snow. Woolworth's father was taking some potatoes to market that day and so Frank crawled up on the sled and sat on a sack of potatoes and rode into Watertown, New York, to start a career that was to bring him wealth and power far beyond his most fantastic expectations.

What was the secret of his success? Just this: He got an idea — a unique idea. He borrowed three hundred dollars and started a store where nothing cost more than a nickel. That first store was in Utica, New York, and it was a total failure. Some days he didn't take in more than $2.50.

Refusing to go into debt, he expanded very slowly at first, opening only twelve stores during the first ten years. Finally, he became one of the wealthiest men in America, built himself what was then the highest office building in the world; paid for it with fourteen million dollars in cash; installed a hundred thousand dollar pipe organ in his home, and began collecting relics of Napoleon.

Years before, when he was a poor young man and had met with defeat so often that he had lost all faith in himself, his mother would come and put her arms around her boy and say: "Don't be discouraged, my son; someday you'll be a rich man."

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And so, he was. The building that bear his name was the tallest in the world (designed by Cass Gilbert, and standing 792 feet was the tallest in the world from 1913 to 1929) and  remains one of the United States' 100 tallest buildings as of 2024.

Frank Winfield Woolworth conceived the building as a headquarters for his company. Woolworth planned the skyscraper jointly with the Irving Trust, which also agreed to use the structure as its headquarters. Its final height was not decided upon until January 1911. Construction started in 1910 and was completed two years later. The building officially opened on April 24, 1913. The Woolworth Building was the tallest building in the world, and would remain so until the opening of the Chrysler Building, in 1929.