W. T. Grant

We're all familiar with Grant's as an anchor store at Valley Fair Mall but why did it leave the mall in the early '70s? 

Grant’s stores had been traditionally smaller variety stores in downtown areas.  (The Grant store at Valley Fair was a welcome exception.)   Even so, Grant was slower than Kresge to adapt to the growth of the suburb and the change in shopping habits that this entailed.  Kresge, after all, had created the concept of the Kmart and they were enormously successful.  But Grant was a little bit late to the dance. 

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the company built many larger stores known as Grant City, (Appleton even had one on Northland Avenue that later morphed into a ShopKo) but unlike Kresge's Kmart, they lacked uniform size and layout, so that a shopper in one did not immediately feel "at home" in another.  The chain's demise in 1975 was in part due to their failure to adapt to changing times but was more likely accelerated by Grant management's insistence that shareholder dividends be continued in spite of whatever monetary difficulties the company might be in.  After the company began to lose money, funds were borrowed to pay the quarterly dividend until it became impossible to continue.  A final tactic to stay in business involved requiring Grant's clerks and cashiers to offer a Grant's credit card application to customers to boost sales in the stores.  Reportedly, the company would extend store credit to all customers, with no attempts made to assess the customers’ ability to repay. 

W. T. Grant's bankruptcy in 1976 was the then-second biggest in US history and, sadly, became a case study in my late '70s Marketing class at UW-O on how not to run a business.  

Pictured above: A double whammy - an obsolete product from a defunct store chain.