Remembering Woolworth’s

by Karen Plunkett-Powell

  —Ronna B. Feldman

  Overseas, Woolworth’s in Ireland was the perfect place to enjoy shepherd’s pie after shopping for the children’s school supplies. The runaway favorites in pre-Revolution Cuba included American pizza, Coca Cola, and cream-filled doughnuts. Many West German towns did a bustling lunch-hour business in bratwurst, sauerkraut, and beer.

  In its heyday, Woolworth’s counters were so busy during breakfast and lunch that there were often long lines. Considering the plethora of restaurants that now line our city streets and highways, it might be hard to imagine that type of crowd gathering in a plain old five-and-dime store. Yet, the fact is, it took a while for McDonald’s, Burger King, White Castle, and Taco Bell to corner the market. Between 1970 and 1995, fast-food restaurants increased by 159%, but before 1970, F. W. Woolworth bakeries and luncheonettes (as well as the counters of rival five-and-dimes) were often the only reasonably priced, fast-service eateries in town.

  During the 1960s, Woolworth’s also introduced Harvest House restaurants in American shopping malls, and Red Grilles in their Woolco stores. By then, approximately eighty percent of F. W. Woolworth variety stores were equipped with some type of eatery. Some had small counters seating ten, while others could seat over 300. There were stand-up counters, sit-down counters, full-fledged cafeterias, bakeries, and simple soda fountains. Denver, Colorado, was home to one of the largest Woolworth’s in the world, and appropriately, the largest food center. That particular site offered a gigantic cafeteria that was a precursor to the familiar “food courts” of today’s shopping malls.

  All combined, this resulted in the need for millions of burger patties, cheese slices, potatoes, and maraschino cherries, which enabled the F. W. Woolworth Company to reign as one of the largest purveyors of prepared foods in the world for half a century.

  When I interviewed former patrons for Remembering Woolworth’s, the vast majority of responses concerned food. It was soon evident that these ran deeper than simple memories of grilled frankfurters or a handful of walnut fudge. For many families, especially those living in rural communities between 1930 and 1960, eating at Woolworth’s on Saturday afternoon was a tradition. It was part of the weekly lifestyle, right up there with Sunday church and Monday wash day. Often, the lunch counter took on the role of a central meeting place for members of the community, or a place of solace for the elderly. Across America, and overseas, the local Woolworth’s luncheonettes became a community within a community.

  The red twirling stools of Woolworth’s were always busy during lunchtime in this Midwestern city, c. 1939.

  Across America, Woolworth Luncheonettes and Restaurants Were Popular Places to Relax After a Shopping Spree.

  There’s a more contemporary feel to this mall-based Woolworth’s restaurant in Virginia.

  Denver, Colorado’s Chuck Wagon food court could serve 700 people at a single sitting. The area contained a large cafeteria, a luncheonette with stools and booths, waitress service, o take-home baked-goods center, a gourmet deli, and a fruit juice facility.

  Gossip, Love, and Scandal on Main Street, U.S.A.

  The F. W. Woolworth lunch counter was a place to meet friends after school, to swap office gossip, or to learn who just dyed their hair platinum blond or who had a new baby. It was a place to dash in during lunch hour to replace your snagged stockings, then buy a bag of fresh-roasted peanuts or potato chips on the way out. As depicted in the movie, Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean the counters were a favorite gathering place for teenagers in the 1940s and ’50s.

  The local Woolworth’s lunch counter often blossomed into a veritable “love central,” the ideal place to meet the man or woman of your dreams. Hundreds of women met their future husbands while employed as Woolworth’s waitresses. Sometimes, the young men were regular soda fountain customers; in other cases they were Woolworth’s stockboys enjoying an afternoon snack break. And, many Woolworth’s managers (who were almost exclusively male, even well into the 1970s) first became enamored of their significant other while watching her serve up portions of “Adam and Eve on a Raft,” decked out in that fetching apron and cap. On the other side of the counter, teenage boys and girls would share ice cream sodas, gazing dreamily into each other’s eyes.

  TIME CAPSULE MEMORY

  “Lunch Counter Tableaus”

  I remember the popcorn machine, just inside the door, of the big Woolworth’s on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C.; its lights bright, and buttery popcorn spilling into the glass box … the white paper bags, nickel popcorn smelled so good, left your mouth salty and your hands greasy. And the lunch counter! At the lunch counter you could sit on leathery stools and order from a menu. Hot dogs and milk shakes and a new drink called Coca Cola … coffee with cream in little pitchers, ice cream … doughnuts, the shiny glazed kind and the white powdered confectioner’s sugar kind. Red catsup and bright yellow mustard on the counter, along with glass bowls filled with tiny cubes of sugar. Hurried men sat at the counter, grabbing a piece of pie and coffee; tired women sat at the counter, feet throbbing and resting on top of their shoes; wrinkled brown shopping bags beside them, having salad and iced tea.—Elizabeth Contessa Heine

  During leaner times, when America was plunged into the Great Depression and World Wars, these memories also portrayed silent sacrifice. Many a struggling mother took her child to a Woolworth’s counter for a sandwich and slice of apple pie while she slowly sipped a cup of tea. It wasn’t until years later that those children realized their parents didn’t order food for themselves as well, because they couldn’t afford even that simple luxury. In small and large towns alike, siblings would routinely pool their money for a heaping dish of vanilla ice cream, served in a silver dish, topped with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry.

  Of course, it was not always calm at the counters. There was that memorable day in 1938 when a waitress in Chicago got so mad at her beau for flirting with a pretty lunch counter customer that the waitress dumped an entire ice cream float over his head. One former patron from Kansas recalls a Saturday afternoon when a fellow citizen, totally overwrought because her pet representative for town council president did not win the election, caused a messy scene at F. W. Woolworth. When the winning opponent sat down at the lunch counter for a midday meal, the irate citizen dashed behind the counter, grabbed the drinking dispenser hose, and soaked the poor man from head to toe.

  In retrospect, it seems as though those Formica counters, with their laminated menus, were always part of our Main Streets. But in fact, food did not appear in Woolworth’s, in any shape or variety, for many years after Frank Woolworth opened his first successful store in 1879. (This is rather curious, considering Frank Woolworth’s legendary personal appetites.) The actual lunch counters, bakeries, and soda fountains, which were responsible for so much of the chain’s popularity, evolved rather slowly, throughout the decades of F. W. Woolworth’s history.

  Woolworth’s “Food” Firsts: Candy, Soda Water, and Ice Cream

  The first official food sold at a F. W. Woolworth was neither chicken soup, grilled hot dogs, nor ice cream—it was candy.

  Back in 1886, shortly after Frank moved from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to a small office on Chambers Street in Manhattan, he did two notable things. First, he devised and placed the historic “Diamond W” trademark on his door, and second, he began beating the pavements in search of cutrate bargains. One of the bargains he was seeking was candy, but every reputable confectioner he visited quickly sent him packing. Woolworth didn’t have the capital, or the need, to buy candy in great bulk. He wanted to start by test marketing candy in his established stores, and that meant a purchase of just a few hundred pounds. Further, all of his “partner-man-agers,” including Satterthwait, Hesslet, Wood- worth, Knox, and McBrier, were skeptical about selling perishable goods, especially in a five-and-ten store. There’d been a recent scare when irresponsible candy makers had used toxic ingredients to color their hard candy, and the market for hard candy wa
s lax. Fine chocolates were always popular, but much too expensive. Fortunately for the future of the company, Frank’s partners relented, and decided to encourage the chief’s pursuit of candy bargains. But there was yet another impediment to Frank’s dreams of satisfying America’s sweet tooth: the jobbers.

  Woolworth was not a man who liked to waste money, and he knew if he secured his merchandise through jobbers, that was exactly what he would be doing. In those days, the East Coast jobbers were the supreme middle-men. They purchased material and perishable goods directly from the manufacturers, and purposely kept the turnaround prices to merchants extremely high. The same rule applied to candy. Small chain owners like Frank Woolworth didn’t have a chance, especially with current wholesale candy costs running between 25¢ and a dollar per pound. He wanted to sell candy retail for 5¢ per quarter pound, and he wanted to eliminate the jobbers and buy direct from the manufacturers. Woolworth believed that, if the idea caught on, everyone would benefit by making a profit on repeat, quantity sales. The problem was, whenever he proposed this scenario, large merchants and small, private candy makers alike would laugh heartily and hand him his hat.

  Frank was not, however, a man to give up easily. One afternoon he was strolling down Wooster Street, west of Broadway, when he walked into the tiny shop of a confectioner named D. Arnould. For the hundredth time in months, Frank boldly shared his idea, expecting Arnould to scoff, or at least tell him to deal directly with a jobber. Arnould did neither. Instead, he told Frank to come back the following day. When Frank returned, he was pleasantly surprised when Arnould showed him several varieties of candies that could be sold for 20¢ a pound. The profit margin would be minuscule, but Arnould agreed it might just pan out.

  TIME CAPSULE MEMORY

  “A Former Candy Girl Remembers …”

  Working at the Woolworth’s candy counter was an exciting experience for a girl of fifteen back in the 1940s. It was my very first job, World War II was just about over, and the Red Bank store was filled with GI’s just returning home. They were handsome and anxious to flirt with the Woolworth’s counter girls and we enjoyed it! When I was hired, the manager said I could eat as much candy as I wanted. This was a shrewd and effective ploy, because after a few days of eating chocolate I never wanted to eat another bite! I remember I was given a little hammer to break small pieces of candy off this huge five-pound block. The candy counter was always one of the busiest places in the store. The aroma of all that candy was wonderful!

  —Marie Ring, Middletown, N.J.

  That day, Woolworth made his first wholesale candy purchase: five hundred pounds of mixed chocolates, chocolate creams, marshmallows, and fine hard candies. He chose five of his eight stores to test-market the new item, with each store being allocated one hundred pounds apiece. He advised his dubious managers to display the candy on attractive glass trays, settled atop the rough hewn shelves, and to watch for the delivery of their newly purchased weight scales. Signs were made up reading: “Candy, 5¢ a quarter pound.”

  A myriad of chocolate-brands, including Schraffts, were available in all the Woolworth’s stores, but some treats were exclusive to particular regions. One type of hard, cherry-filled candy was only sold in Philadelphia, and “Peach Buds” a hard-shell peanut-butter-filled candy, were only available in New England.

  The following Saturday, the stores simultaneously started selling candy. By that evening, every last piece was gone. Woolworth smiled smugly when he heard the news. He’d had one of his “feelings” that candy would be popular: Who could possibly resist a chocolate treat for a few pennies? Back in New York, Mr. Arnould, the man who had taken a chance on Frank, started making a tidy profit, as customers in Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and Trenton, New Jersey, demanded more and more candy. As the F. W. Woolworth syndicate expanded from a handful of stores to hundreds, Arnould’s Wooster Street company also expanded, and eventually found housing in a great factory on Canal Street. Several other candy makers, who had been struggling along selling lemon drops and bon bons to jobbers, became direct distributors to Woolworth. Many of them, including Arnould, became fabulously wealthy in the process. In those days, it paid off to attach oneself to Frank Woolworth’s star—even if others believed his ideas were out of this world, or that he was out of his mind. In the ensuing years, manufacturers of everything from Christmas garlands to stationery would forgo the middle-men and deal direct with Woolworth. As a result, they too became millionaires. In the meantime, it didn’t take long to figure out that the closer he kept his candy to the front door, the better his profits. The tantalizing aroma and vision of chocolate would lure people in to sample a quarter pound, then continue shopping for other articles. Candy fast became one of the features of Woolworth’s, especially around the holidays.

  When Frank opened up his first Brooklyn store on Fulton Street in 1885, he invested extra money in the candy display, installing four incandescently illuminated showcases. This type of lighting in a five-and-ten was considered revolutionary, and it worked to impress. With the displays in place, he focused on his employees. Woolworth set high standards for all his counter girls, who made up the majority of his workforce, but the candy girls were under special scrutiny. Since he couldn’t be everywhere at once, Woolworth hired Charles G. Griswold as store inspector. Griswold, who was quickly dubbed “Old Eagle Eye” by the managers, wrote this report about one store’s candy display:

  “Shades and mirrors clean but the shades on the lights were an exception. The candy girl wore one of the dirtiest aprons I’d seen for some time and her hair looked like “sloppy weather.’”

  To which Woolworth promptly responded:

  “Glad the inspector called the manager’s attention to the untidy appearance of the candy girl. I wish to impress on every manager to put the neatest, cleanest and most attractive girls behind your candy counter, as it surely helps to increase sales.”

  And so, they did, from thereafter.

  By the turn of the new century, many more varieties of confections had been added, making the candy center impossible to resist. Customers were treated to a colorful menagerie of lemon drops, lollipops (or “lickers”), novelty candies, mints, bob bons, jelly beans, chocolate-covered pecans, and fudge of every kind. The candy counters eventually expanded to full-blown candy and nut centers, and, during the 1950s, to centers with modern glass candy carousals. Snacks such as hot roasted peanuts and popcorn soon enhanced the sweet center. Some people still recall buying fresh-roasted potato chips for twenty-five cents a shopping bag, savoring every bite of the chips’ crunchy, salty, greasy decadence.

  Without a doubt, one of the biggest boons to Woolworth’s candy business was chewing gum. Commercial chewing gum, in one form or another, had been around since the Civil War era, but around 1914, this little item reached new levels of national popularity. Woolworth was ready to meet the demand, and added it to his candy orders. In 1919 alone, the year of Woolworth’s death, he’d sold 14 million packages. These numbers increased steadily as Prohibition took form, the years when clove-flavored gum (which hid the smell of alcohol on the breath) became the rage of genteel and working classes alike. By 1950, the company was reporting candy and gum sales of 250 million pounds per year.

  TIME CAPSULE MEMORY

  “Roasted Potato Chips, Five-and-Dime Style”

  Before we were married, my husband and I used to go to the Woolworth’s on Newark Avenue, in Jersey City, New Jersey, which was always a very busy store. My favorite treat there was hot-roasted potato chips. I can still remember the aroma of these crispy chips. The potatoes were sliced paper thin and then roasted in a large glass square machine, similar to a popcorn machine. They were really large potatoes, and so the chips were sometimes the size of your hand! You would get them by the pound (for 25¢ a pound, I think) and the server would place them in a small brown shopping bag. By the time you got down the street, the bottom of the bag was all greasy and so were your hands. These chips were wonderful and I have never seen the
se anywhere since.

  —Mrs. Elaine De Risi, N.J.

  Candy had made such a big splash in 1886 that Woolworth speculated that other types of foods and refreshments might also please his customers. He experimented over the next twenty years. Unfortunately, not every attempt at merchandising food was successful.

  The first major disappointment occurred in 1897, when Frank introduced a limited line of “Woolworth’s Diamond W Pure Foods” in five stores. The particulars of this venture are unclear, but it is presumed these were simple canned or bottled goods that Woolworth had produced exclusively for his Red-Fronts. The “Pure Foods” concept enjoyed a flurry of success, but was discontinued in 1899.

  The second strike was hit shortly after the turn of the century, when a “phosphate soda water counter” was opened in Woolworth’s Newark, New Jersey, store. The carbonated chiller didn’t catch on and was soon discontinued. Several years later, in 1907, E. Z. Nutting, the enterprising manager of the Market Street, Philadelphia, store suggested a combination soda water fountain and simple snack counter. This experienced a level of success, but not enough to merit long-term support from the chief, who glumly acknowledged the soda water fountain as yet another failed venture.

  Woolworth Trivia

  In 1950 alone, the Red-Fronts sold 250 million pounds of gum.

  It certainly seemed as though the refreshment idea was a lost cause, when the tides unexpectedly started to change. On May 13, 1910, ice cream cones were test-marketed in several of the busier sites, with Horton Company furnishing modern refrigerators. The frosty treat quickly caught on, as did the idea of the unknown manager who proposed selling hot dogs at lunchtime, along with that refreshing American favorite, root beer, which was drawn from an oak barrel atop the counter. The concept of selling refreshments in a variety store finally seemed potentially profitable. The question was, how far should his company go to make this venture fly? By then, Woolworth’s little syndicate had become F. W. Woolworth & Co., a corporation with 268 stores and eight district offices. Frank was already making millions, but a few extra million in food sales couldn’t hurt. He and his corporate circle assessed the situation and decided that, in order to make this notion really take off, they had to do it in a big way. They wanted to lure in even more customers, and what better way than making sure the customers didn’t even have to leave the store for lunch? Woolworth also thought that the idea of a full-service restaurant was original enough to steal some thunder (and press time) from his arch competitors, Kresge and McCrory. By then, these five-and-dime men were purposely renting space on the same streets where F. W. Woolworth & Co. stores had once ruled in solitary discount splendor. It was time to take action, with no expense spared. He decided to create the first ever, fullscale restaurant in a five-and-dime.