Product Details

Historical Context

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In 1906 the first "W. T. Grant Co. 25 Cent Store" opened in Lynn, Massachusetts, founded by William Thomas Grant. Like many national chain stores and some larger department stores, Grant arranged for a low price exclusive record label, Diva. Columbia Records produced this label which consisted of titles also issued on Columbia's general sale Harmony label and it existed from 1925 through 1930. Grant continued to sell records after 1930, but they no longer had their own label.

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; in the 1960s and early 1970s, the company built many larger stores (later known as Grant City), 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 a failure to adapt to changing times but was probably accelerated by management's refusal until it was too late to eliminate the shareholder dividend. After the company began to lose money, funds were borrowed to pay the quarterly dividend until this became impossible. 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.

Grant's store-branded electronics and other goods were named Bradford after Bradford County, Pennsylvania, where William Thomas Grant was born. The in-store restaurants were named Bradford House, and their mascot was a pilgrim named Bucky Bradford.

The largest W.T. Grant store was located in Vails Gate, New York. It became a Caldor and several other stores, and is now a Kmart. During the 1950s and 1960s there was a Grant's store located on 87th street and 3rd avenue in Manhattan, New York.

W. T. Grant's bankruptcy in 1976 was the then-second biggest in US history. The most apparent cause of the bankruptcy was the company's decision to extend store credit to all customers, with no attempt made to assess the customer's ability to repay. Each of the company's stores had credit managers who authorized the opening of store credit accounts, which resulted in many customers having credit accounts with more than one of the company's stores. In addition, there existed no centralized control or record-keeping of store credit accounts which resulted in noncollectable accounts. The credit was recovered in 1976 by Irwin Jacobs who with the backing of Carl Pohlad purchased their consumer accounts receivable account of $276.3 million for $44 million and 5% of first-year sales.

This initiative to extend credit to all customers was made in 1969, during a prosperous period in US history, when Grant was expanding into new areas of the US and hopeful of pulling customers from rival Kresge and other department-store companies. The low number of defaulters on small loans at this time meant that the credit arrangements looked like a good idea, but the complete absence of any credit check, and the low minimum repayment terms offered by Grant were extreme, even for the times. When the economic expansion slowed in 1970/1971 the balance shifted and the credit arrangement became more of a liability than an asset. No decision was made to change or halt this before 1974 when the company's collapse was a certainty.

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