Eight-Million-Dollar Baby

Marble-fronted, white and gleaming, the world's largest Woolworth store opened on Houston's bustling Main Street. It cost $8,000,000, is completely air-conditioned, seats 150 at its lunch counter. On opening day, 40,000 Houstonians gawked at the big "History of Texas" mural between the front doors, rode up & down the escalators, kept cash registers ringing. Although most middle-aged people still think of Woolworth's as a "Five and Dime," the Houston store last week showed how great the change has been behind the old familiar red front. There were canaries for $9.95, fishing rods and reels for $15, mechanical trains for $21.65 and bicycles for $44.95.

In this fashion, Woolworth's spotlighted a building and improvement program on which it has spent $25,574,000 in the last two years. When the job is done, Woolworth's will have transformed itself completely into a medium-price variety chain. The company has already copied many merchandising frills from its tonier competitors. The Houston store will make free deliveries of purchases over $5 and, like some other Woolworth stores, it has a "layaway" plan—a kind of charge account in reverse—under which a customer makes a down payment on a piece of merchandise, pays regular installments, but does not get the article Until it is completely paid for. The company also took another radical step (for Woolworth's) this year: it bought space in 325 papers in 216 cities to test the merits of nation-wide newspaper advertising campaigns.

The shift into higher prices has not hurt Woolworth's. Last year the company grossed $623,942,000 (more than double what it did in its best five-and-dime days), for a net of $43,496,000. It expects to do just about as well in 1949. Many of its sales still come from small items: last year the company sold 26 million hairnets, 31 million combs, 100 million pounds of candy. And Store Manager Herbert H. Hocher assured Houstonians that price-conscious Woolworth's has not entirely abandoned the small-change standard. Said he: "We still have a nickel cup of coffee."