National chain shutting doors; two Las Vegas stores among casualties

Bob Shemeligian

Friday, July 18, 1997 | 9:52 a.m.

At the F.W. Woolworth store at the corner of Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard, the phones were ringing all day Thursday, interrupting cashiers busily ringing up sales.

"Yes, we just heard the news this morning," said Rocky, one of three cashiers. "We've very sorry, but the stores are closing."

"It's a shame," Rocky said to a customer after she hung up the phone. "This store is very busy. We do a lot of business with locals, tourists, walk-in traffic, you name it."

It's been that way at the Fremont Street Woolworth store since the five-and-dime opened in November 1948.

"In the 1940s and 1950s, people in Las Vegas used to go downtown to shop," said David Millman, curator of the Nevada State Museum and Historical Society. "That Woolworth store is one of the city's earliest department stores still in existence."

But not for long.

The 22,500-square-foot Fremont Street store and the 43,700-square-foot two-story store at the Boulevard Mall are among 400 five-and-dimes -- remnants of a chain of more than 2,000 stores in the early 1960s -- that will close within six months.

The company said Thursday it will lay off 9,200 employees nationwide, officially ending the dime store era.

Faced with competition from Wal-Mart and other big discount chains, F.W. Woolworth stores couldn't survive as shoppers left downtown America for giant malls and outlet centers.

"The consumer has changed toward shopping at large, big box, deep-discount retailers," said Roger Farah, Woolworth chief executive. "That has left the Woolworth division without a clear niche."

The general merchandise chain, founded 118 years ago by F.W. Woolworth, is now a division of Woolworth Corp., which also operates athletic and speciality retail outlets such as Foot Locker, Champs Sport and Northern Group of apparel stores.

The F.W. Woolworth division lost $37 million on $1 billion in sales in 1996 and lost $24 million in the first quarter of 1997.

"Woolworth died long ago, it just wasn't buried," said Kurt Barnard, president of Barnard's Retail Marketing Report. "This is the finale of a company that has lost its reason for being."

Spokesmen for the company's corporate headquarters, still located in the 60-story brick "Cathedral of Commerce" that F.W. Woolworth built in 1913, noted that 100 general merchandise stores throughout the nation will be converted to athletic and specialty retail shops, but the Las Vegas stores "probably will not" be among them.

Among the employees who will be laid off are 22 full- and part-time workers at the Fremont Street store and 68 workers at the Maryland Parkway store.

"I can't believe the stores are closing," said Lezlie Greco of Las Vegas. "How can you have a Boulevard Mall without Woolworth?"

Greco said she remembers riding her bicycle to a Woolworth dime store as a child growing up in Oregon.

"It's too bad," said Pearl McDermott, a clerk at the Boulevard Mall store. "They're good to me at this store, and I hate to seem close."

Another clerk, who asked to remain anonymous, said some employees have been working at the Boulevard Mall store for more than 25 years.

"Marcie's one of them," the clerk said. "She's the nicest lady. It's going to be real hard for her to find another job."

A Woolworth spokesman said the company would try to place as many dime store employees as possible at positions in specialty and apparel shops.

"There will also be severance packages and unemployment," the spokesman said.

At the downtown Las Vegas dime store, most customers seemed unaware they are among the last in a nearly half-century-long merchandising tradition on Fremont Street.

"It's a great place," said Anthony Dinato, a vacationer from New York City. "Where else can you buy portable fans, toothpaste and pillows at the same location?"

The Fremont Street store is typical of many older Woolworth dime stores in that only half of the indoor space -- about 10,000 square feet -- is used as a selling area. The other half is used for stock and office space.

The lunch counters -- a century-old Woolworth tradition -- are long since gone from the Fremont Street and Boulevard Mall stores.

There is no place to eat at the Fremont Street store, and at the Boulevard store, instead of an intimate lunch counter, there is now Down Home Country Cooking, a full-service restaurant with a separate entrance.

Generations ago, Woolworth lunch counters provided a hot meal and a chance for hungry shoppers to rest their feet.

They are also a part of history.

In the 1960s, when four black students were denied lunch at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., a 50-city protest erupted, and Woolworth eventually changed its discriminatory practices.

Years earlier, hiring practices at the lunch counter of the Fremont Street Woolworth store sparked one of the city's first Culinary Union pickets.

"I suppose it was because nonunion workers were hired at the lunch counter," Millman said. "The union picketed the store for a year and a half, all through 1948, finally ending the picket in June 1949."

Still, many people crossed the picket line to shop at the Woolworth store and to eat at the lunch counter.

"The lunch counter was all electric," Millman said, "and everyone was excited about that."

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS contributed to this report.