The “five-and-ten store” officially departed the American landscape in 1997. That year, the F. W. Woolworth Company ended 118 years in the discount retail business.
In fact, the five-and-dime store had already passed away forty years earlier. As the Post reported it,
“The five-and-ten, as an American institution, came to a quiet end on November 13, 1935. The occasion was a meeting of the board of directors of the F. W. Woolworth Co. The action they took was designed to engineer the company into merchandising more profitably than the price-restricted field of five-and-ten.”
