W. T. Grant
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- This article is about W. T. Grant stores, for the namesake founder, see William Thomas Grant
W. T. Grant was the name of a chain of United States-based mass-merchandise stores founded by William Thomas Grant. The stores were generally of the dime store format located in downtowns.
In 1906 the first "W. T. Grant Co. 25 Cent Store" opened in Lynn, Massachusetts. Modest profit, coupled with a fast turnover of inventory, caused the stores to grow to almost $100 million a year in sales by 1936, the same year that William Thomas Grant started the W. T. Grant Foundation. By the time Mr. Grant died in 1972, at age 96, his nationwide empire of W. T. Grant Stores had grown to almost 1,200.
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 adapt to changing times but was probably considerably accelerated by management'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 requiring each Grant's clerk and cashier unfailingly to offer a Grant's credit card application to customers in order to boost sales in the stores.
Grant's store-branded electronic and other goods were "Bradford" after the county where William Thomas Grant was born in Pennsylvania.
