W. T. Grant

W. T. Grant was the founder of a chain of U.S. mass-merchandise stores bearing his name. The stores were generally of the dime store format located in downtowns.

Related Topics:
U.S. - Dime store

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William Thomas Grant was a born salesman with a will to succeed. At age 7, he began his sales career by selling flower seeds. Years later,he wanted to sell people what they needed at prices they could afford, with only a modest profit. At 30 years of age he opened his first "W. T. Grant Co. 25 Cent Store" in Lynn, Massachusetts. His initial capital was $1,000 he had saved from his work as a salesman. This modest profit, coupled with a fast turnover of inventory, caused Mr. Grant's business to grow to almost $100 million a year in sales by 1936, the same year that he started the W.T. Grant Foundation. By the time Mr. Grant passed away in 1972, at age 96, his nationwide empire of WT Grant Stores had grown to almost 1,200.

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Grant's stores were slower than the Kresge stores to adapt to the growth of the suburb and the change in shopping habits that this entailed. The attempt to correct this was belated; by the late 1960s there were some "Grant City" stores, but unlike Kresge's Kmart they were not of uniform sizes or layouts, meaning that a shopper in one did not immediately feel "at home" in another. The chain's demise in 1975 was in part due to a failure to adopt to changing times but was probably considerably accelerated by managment's refusal until it was too late to eliminate the shareholder dividend; even after the company began to lose money, funds were borrowed to pay the quarterly dividend until this became impossible. A last-gasp tactic to stay in business involved each Grant's clerk and cashier to unfailingly offer a Grant's credit card application to customers in order to hopefully boost sales in the stores.

Related Topics:
Suburb - 1960s - Kmart - 1975 - Dividend

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Grant's store-branded electronic and other goods were "Bradford".

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Among his avocations were philosophy, painting, and local philanthropy. In his later years, Mr. Grant was Chairman of the Board of the WT Grant Company, and President of the W. T. Grant Foundation and later Chairman of the Board. He received honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from Bates College in Maine and the University of Miami. He retired from both the WT Grant Company and the Grant Foundation at age 90, yet still served in an honorary capacity until his death.

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References: W.T. Grant Foundation

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