Woolco

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

Woolco was F. W. Woolworth Company’s full-line discount-store division: a bigger, brasher answer to the old five-and-dime. Its prototype store opened in Columbus, Ohio, on June 6, 1962, while the division’s headquarters were established in New York City’s Woolworth Building. The formula was simple: put an enormous spread of everyday merchandise under one fluorescently ambitious roof.

The chain grew across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, selling the kind of practical bounty that could turn one errand into an afternoon. Apparel, housewares, toys, electronics, furniture, and the odd irresistible aisle detour all belonged in the Woolco universe. It was discount retail with a shopping cart big enough for optimism.

The American operation did not survive the brutal discount-store brawl of the early 1980s. Woolworth announced on September 24, 1982, that it would close all 336 U.S. Woolco stores; liquidation was completed by January 1983. Canadian Woolco stores remained open, however, carrying the banner onward for another decade.

Our Woolco collection celebrates the cavernous aisles, no-nonsense value, and wonderfully excessive promise of the classic discount department store—where you went in for socks and emerged with a patio chair, a record, and absolutely no explanation.