The First Woolworth Five-and-Dime Opens

On 22 February 1879, a young dry-goods clerk named Frank Winfield Woolworth opened a cramped one-room store on Bleecker Street in Utica, New York. His idea was radical for the era: every item carried a fixed, visible price of five cents. A banner above the counters simply read “Any article 5¢.”

The gimmick that powered it was the open table. Instead of hiding goods behind a clerk who haggled, Woolworth piled cheap merchandise where customers could touch and choose for themselves. It was the ancestor of modern self-service retail.

Location, he learned, was everything: if a store didn’t make a profit, you closed it and moved on.

The Utica shop flopped within a couple of months, too small and too poorly placed to draw crowds. But Woolworth carried the lesson — and the sign — to Lancaster, Pennsylvania later that year, where the format finally stuck. He soon added a ten-cent line, and the “five-and-dime” was born. By the 20th century the company spanned thousands of stores across several countries, an American institution built from a five-cent table.