FRANK WINFIELD WOOLWORTH

BIGGEST RETAIL MERCHANT IN WORLD WAS LONG A FAILURE

Frank W. Woolworth was Gawky Farm Boy-Married on $10 a week and was Reduced to $8-His First Five Stores Failed-Now Employs 50,000 People and Owns Tallest Building

[Welland Telegraph, 26 June 1917]

Three titles to distinction are claimed for Frank W. Woolworth. First, he is the largest retail merchant in the world. Second, he owns the tallest building (and one of the handsomest) in the world. Third, he was the greenest and gawkiest boy who ever came off a farm. He was such a palpable hayseed, indeed, that try as he might, no merchant at first would engage him at any price. He had to work for three months without any wages and board himself, and he was told that he ought to consider himself lucky because he did not have to pay his employer a tuition fee. For a humble beginning that must come pretty near to breaking all records.

When finally young Woolworth did find work, without wages, and after two and a half years moved on to another job at $10 a week, so complete a failure did he prove at selling goods, according to B.C. Forbes, writing in Leslie’s, that his small pay was reduced instead of increased-and the shock temporarily shattered his health. Biography probably contains no more novel experience of an American captain of industry.

It was in 1873 that young Woolworth arrived in Watertown, N.Y., with a note of introduction to the senior partner of Augsbury and Moore, dry goods merchants, but didn’t want them.

At the end of two and a half years he was getting $6 a week. Hearing of a vacancy in another store he went to apply. But when he saw how higgledy-piggledy everything was he decided to name a high salary, thinking to be turned down. He asked $10 a week and was astonished when the proprietor said,: “All right, when will you commence?” He took the job, and on this big salary he felt justified in getting married. After a couple of months, the proprietor met him in the basement one day and unceremoniously told him there were boys getting $6 a week who sold more goods than he sold, and that they could not continue to pay him $10 a week. So his pay was cut to $8 a week-and he a married man.

“This was a terrible blow, and under it my health gave way. For a year I was at home unable to do a stroke of work. I became convinced that I was not fitted for mercantile life. Eventually my former employers offered me $10 a week to come back and tone up the store. I remained with them two years until I opened up my first five-cent store at Utica, N.Y., on February 22, 1879.”

We read that, less than two years after the pioneer five-and-ten-cent store idea was inaugurated, its author finding himself worth $2,000, “which looked bigger to him then, than $20,000,000 would now,” and in need of a vacation, revisited Watertown and “was received like a conquering hero.”

Incidently three out of the first five stores opened by Woolworth proved failures. In fact it was not until he opened a five-and-ten-cent store in New York in 1886, and again lost his health through overwork, that he began to see success written in big letters. Since his first breakdown his health had never recovered fully and at the time, we read, he was running his New York office single-handed, with the result that he was stricken with typhoid fever and for eight weeks was unable to attend to business.

Today-thirty years later-the business boasts a store in every town of eight thousand population or more in the United States, has a daily average of over two and a quarter million customers and gives employment to between forty and fifty thousand people. It has become a $65,000,000 organization whose most colossal advertisement, if not monument, is the sixty story New York skyscraper for which the erstwhile Watertown “failure” paid $14,000,000 in cash. His somewhat Napoleonic ambition, we read, is “to open a store in every civilized town throughout the world.”