Five & Dime, Dimestore, Dollar Store

The other day I was stiching up my husband’s “Walter Payton” “Chicago Bears” jersey that I bought for him last Christmas.  He had torn open one of the seams at Tommy Rockers Southside, a bar that embraces the Chicago Bears.  Since we don’t have a professional team in Vegas a lot of the bars adopt a team.

So anyway, I get out my sewing kit, that I have had since I was in high school.  Take out a pack of needles and all of a sudden I notice it say Grants on the package. W.T. Grants.  This stirred up a bunch of memories.

  

Grants was located in a little shopping center and it was one of the stores that my mom would allow us to walk to.  I think there was a pizza place close to it so we would sneak in a slice of pizza as fast as we could before we had to be home.  I asked my husband (who is from Indiana, Chicago area) if he had a Grants.  He didn’t remember having a Grants, this prompted me to look up Grants on wikipedia and here is what I found.

Per Wikipedia:  W. T. Grant or Grants was a chain of United States -based mass-merchandise stores founded by William Thomas Grant. The stores were generally of the dimestore format located in downtowns.

In 1906 the first “W. T. Grant Co. 25 Cent Store” opened in Lynn, Massachusetts. Modest profit, coupled with a fast turnover of inventory, caused the stores to grow to almost $100 million a year in sales by 1936, the same year that William Thomas Grant started the W. T. Grant Foundation. By the time Mr. Grant died in 1972, at age 96, his nationwide empire of W. T. Grant Stores had grown to almost 1,200.

Dimestore, I remembered that term, my parents would use it, my grand parents would say “the five and dime”. 

Per Wikipedia:  The concept of the variety store originated with the five and ten, nickel and dime, five and dime or dimestore, a store where everything cost either five cents (a nickel) or ten cents (a dime). The originator of the concept may be Woolworth’s, which began in 1878 in Watertown, New York. Other five and tens that existed in the USA included W.T. Grant, J.J. Newberry’s, McCrory’s, Kresge, McLellan’s, and Ben Franklin stores. These stores originally featured merchandise priced at only five cents or ten cents, although later in the century the price range of merchandise expanded. Inflation eventually dictated that the stores were no longer able to sell any items for five or ten cents, and were then referred to as “variety stores”. Given that $0.05 in 1913 when adjusted for inflation is $1.06 in 2008 dollars, this retailing concept has shown remarkable vitality over the years.

Well-known dimestore companies included:

• Duckwall-ALCO
• Ben Franklin stores
• Butler Brothers
• W.T. Grant
• S.S. Kresge Co.
• S.H. Kress & Co.
• McCrory’s
• J.J. Newberry’s
• TG&Y
• McLellan’s
• Neisner’s
• H.L. Green
• G.C. Murphy
• Woolworth’s
• Walton’s Five and Dime
• Vidler’s Five and Dime
• Morgan & Lindsey

Of these, only Duckwall-ALCO and Ben Franklin continue to exist in this form, while Kresge and Walton’s went on to become mega-retailers Kmart and Wal-Mart. Beginning around the 1960’s, others tried the larger “discount store” format as well, such as W.T. Grant, Woolworth’s Woolco stores, and TG&Y Family Centers.

Today we have the “dollar stores”, I love them, you can find a lot of things that create a fun day for the kids, spruce up a party or holiday, snatch up some cheap rewards for completing weekly chores.  And guess how much they cost, a DOLLAR!  Yeah!

Caiden played with these dollar store inner tubes most of the day!