A once-common piece of Americana, the five and dime variety store, has been in a steady decline for decades. Another push was administered this week when the Woolworth Corp. announced it was closing more than 400 of the stores in a makeover of its corporate image.
Among the closures is the Woolworth store in Ogden. Since 1987, when the Woolworth store in downtown Salt Lake City ceased operation, other Woolworths have gone out of business in Sugar House, Roy, Provo and Price. Only a Cottonwood Mall area Woolworth store will be left in Utah after the Ogden outlet closes its doors.The company began last year to shut down 900 money-losing stores, most of them general merchandise stores that were once the heart and soul of the downtown retailing business. Woolworth will retain about 450 of the variety stores.
For a generation raised on malls or suburban shopping centers, the Woolworth image is largely blurred or unknown. But for Americans of another era, Woolworth is firmly fixed as a Norman Rockwell-type memory of Main Street. It seemed every town had a Woolworth store. The very name conjured up a distinct mental picture.
The stores were an integral part of the urban landscape, stretching back into another century. F.W. Woolworth opened his first store in Utica, N.Y., in 1879 and the variety store concept quickly became successful.
Although not everything in the shop cost five or 10 cents, the name was apt enough to stick, even in later years when hardly anything was being sold for a nickel or dime. The focus was on inexpensive goods, not elegance.
Ask people what they remember about a Woolworth store and the answers can be surprising. Some recall wooden floors; for others it is the smell of food and popcorn and a busy lunch counter; most remember a sense of bustle and a vast variety of merchandise. And a few mention a kind of small-town atmosphere.
The changing face of American business has all but erased the Main Street five-and-dime store operation. But the Woolworth name can still give rise to a nostalgic memory of what downtown shopping once meant.