I Was a Stockboy at F. W. Woolworth
Does That Make Me Old?
You are reading Shy Guy Meets the Buddha: Reflections on Work, Love, and Nature. This weekly newsletter is always free, but if you’d like to show your support, a tip will help me continue the hard work behind these creative efforts; “Buy me a coffee” by clicking the button below. “Liking,” sharing, commenting, and subscribing will help promote my newsletter. Please take a few moments to show you care. Thank you! 💚
This morning I asked a friend, a coffee shop owner twenty years my junior, if he had always wanted to work in the food industry (No). I told him that when I searched for my first official job, not counting paper routes, babysitting, and helping my uncle clear stones out of a field for a dollar an hour, I instinctively knew that I didn’t want to work with food. That meant no grocery stores and no restaurants, which is how I ended up sweeping floors after school at our local Woolworth’s.
My friend said, “What’s Woolworth’s?”
And that was when I realized I’m getting old.
For other readers and friends who don’t know what Woolworth’s is (and I’m still trying to wrap my head around that. But, then, in fairness, I can name only one song title by any of the top ten most famous singers in the world on Ranker, and three of those singers I have never heard of), here is a quick history.
The “Woolworth’s Great Five Cents Store” was opened in 1879 by Frank W. Woolworth in Utica, New York. That first store failed within months but was quickly replaced by another in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and a third, with his brother, in Scranton. Ol’ Frank must have been a fast learner because great success followed. By 1979, F. W. Woolworth Company would become the largest retail department store chain in the world.
According to Wikipedia, Woolworth’s was the first to introduce the “five and ten-cent store,” a discounting concept that undercut the prices of local dry goods stores, thus marking the early beginnings of the big box takeover. Thanks, Wikipedia; my image of F. W. Woolworth as the quintessential small-town American shopping and gathering experience is blown.
Another record breaker: The Woolworth Building in New York City—paid for in cash, so profitable was the company—was the tallest building in the world from the time of its completion in 1913 until 1930. (The designation was taken over by 40 Wall Street and then very quickly by the Chrysler Building. Again, all this is straight off Wikipedia, lest you think I’m some crank of corporate culture.)
The Greensboro sit-ins of 1960, which started when four black college students refused to leave a “whites only” Woolworth’s lunch counter in North Carolina and quickly grew to thousands of protesters across hundreds of stores, ultimately leading to the cessation of the firm’s racist policies, assured F. W. Woolworth a permanent place, if not necessarily a proud one, in America’s cultural and political history. The Greensboro Woolworth’s is now the International Civil Rights Center & Museum.
In addition to my future employer—the Main Street Woolworth’s in my hometown in southeastern Massachusetts—I always enjoyed our not-so-corporate five-and-dime outside the city center. Charlie Goldstein’s, it was called. My grandmother would send us there on bikes to fetch a couple packs of cigarettes for her (Marlboro unfiltered) and some candy for ourselves (Snickers for me, always), and once in a while she allowed us to buy a cheap toy from the back wall of the store, which was plastered with plastic temptations: toy cars and trucks, collections of tiny green army soldiers or red-and-yellow cowboys and Indians, baby dolls and doll-house furniture, toy fishing poles, cap guns, spinning tops and Slinkies and jacks, coloring books and paper dolls, and my favorite, balsa-wood gliders. You fit the wings and tail into the body and then see who can make theirs fly the farthest. My grandmother lived on the second floor of an apartment house so you know those suckers were gliding right out the open bathroom window into the back yard, at least until we got yelled at.
So I got hired as a stockboy at F. W. Woolworth’s my junior year of high school. “Stockboy” was my title, anyway, though now that I think of it, I never actually stocked any shelves. I’m not sure who did that. I bicycled there directly from school, took the freight elevator up to the second-floor stockroom, grabbed one of those oblong dust mops with a long wooden handle, and got started on the sales floor (riding that noisy freight elevator was probably the best part of the whole job). After sweeping the aisles, emptying the trash, and restocking the paper shopping bags beneath the cash registers, I headed over to the lunch counter to empty the trash there and mop the floor behind the counter, working around the cook’s feet, all to the piped-in Top-40 tunes of Carly Simon, Lionel Richie, Donna Summer, and the Bee Gees. Then the coolest of my duties: beyond all the racks of sweaters and socks, stationery, perfume, lamps and hardware, was the pet department, featuring a scanty variety of birds and fish in their respective cages/aquariums. Clean out the paper-lined trays and wipe down the glass fronts. Sprinkle in some fish food and fill the little seed trays. Once in a while there was a pet delivery and I would place the plastic bags of guppies and goldfish into the water to acclimate. When a pair of green lovebirds got loose in the store, the manager sent me home in anger.
That was my boss, Mr. B. His assistant manager was Winnie. Mr. B was stern in public and mostly nice in private. Winnie was nice in public and kind of mean in private. I quit eight months later when Mr. B went on vacation and Winnie became mean in both public and private. She was reprimanding me about something that wasn’t my fault up in the stockroom and I said, “I quit,” and she said, “Okay.” Mr. B never called to find out what happened so I guess he didn’t really miss me that much. He had always raved about his former stock boy, a responsible young man, now in college, who would change lightbulbs in the unused back stairway without even being asked. I guess Mr. B was willing to wait for someone more like his paragon of self-motivated stock-boys.
This was about 1979 or 1980, which did not feel like the height of Woolworth’s domination of the retail industry; more like the beginning of its descent to irrelevance. Most of the shoppers at the downtown store were gray-haired, cotton-sweatered ladies of diminutive stature towing along husbands in suspendered bluejeans. My parents and my friends’ parents did their shopping over at the new mall, or at Kmart or Zaire. I read once that a great transformation in shopping design was the idea of pushing stores back away from the sidewalk and providing more parking in front; in other words, the creation of shopping plazas. I don’t think Woolworth’s got on that train, at least not under its original name.
But here’s something I was surprised to learn online: F. W. Woolworth never actually ceased. The company experimented with various smaller-format outlets and mall locations, bought Kinney Shoes in 1963, found shoes and sporting goods to be especially productive investments, and finally, in 2001, changed its name to its most successful retailer, Foot Locker, Inc.
Foot Locker!
Huh.
A testament to the adage, “adapt or die,” I guess.
I once swore I would never start referring to myself as “old,” or even worry about getting old. But I have learned through my meditation practice that coming to terms with aging is not quite as simple as repressing my thoughts about it. The wise ones encourage us to look intentionally at aging, to see that every one of us is of the nature to grow old, to get sick, and to die. Only by accepting this fully can I let go of concerns about how much time I have left and instead live fully in this moment, which is really the only moment that exists, ever and always.
If you believe the Buddhist interpretations of death, Woolworth’s still exists in Foot Locker, and my great grandmother endures in me. Death is not an end, it’s a transformation. Like Woolworth’s, my body in its current manifestation may eventually shut down, disappear, and be all but forgotten, but me, die?
I’m just going to change my name and keep on going.
Wait! Before you go, will you take one moment to hit that SHARE button? This one simple action can be surprisingly effective at helping spread the word and build my readership. Thank you! And remember, subscribing is free and easy, and tips are very much appreciated. 💚
I remember sitting at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s for a lunch during afternoon shopping excursions with my aunt. Hamburger, coke and apple pie. I always felt so grown up.
Wow, this writing brought back memories. Being from Utica, I can remember going to Woolworth’s, the green army men in plastic bags, the 45’s & lp’s in the record dept. , being able to buy small turtles and plastic homes for them that had an island in the middle with a palm tree on it. It’s interesting how the mention of a place can bring back also a memory of a smell or a sound. Whenever I hear or think of Woolworth’s it’s the sound of those heavy plates & coffee cups being put into the bins to be washed from the lunch counter. Don, thanks for triggering a memory of the past!