Word: penneyer
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...cities and towns, most of them under 10,000 population, the unpretentious façade of J. C. Penney Co. is as familiar as Main Street. The farmer who goes to town usually stops at Penney's, and so do the townsfolk who don't mind cash & carrying from Penney's to save dollars. This habit of year-in & year-out buying at Penney's has built the company, which has stores in every state, into the third biggest U.S. retail chain. Last year, only Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward & Co., Inc. sold more goods...
Last week, at a time when U.S. retailers were feeling a sag in sales (average: 4%), Penney's was still booming. In the first five months this year, its sales of $305 million were 5% higher than in 1948. Penney's was completing three new stores (in Houston, Sault Sainte Marie, Mich, and Midvale, Utah), expanding its store in Albuquerque, opening another one in Oklahoma City. Next January it will also open a big new store in Springfield, Mass., its 1,608th outlet...
Poverty & Progress. All this grew from a single store which 27-year-old James Cash Penney started 47 years ago in the mining town of Kemmerer, Wyo. (pop. 1,000). Young Penney, frail and ailing, had gone West for his health from Hamilton, Mo., where he grew up in poverty on the farm of his father, an unpaid Baptist preacher. From the age of eight, young J.C. had to buy his own clothes; at 19 heard his dying father murmur: "Jim will make it. I like the way he has started...
...tiny Kemmerer, just about everybody bought on credit, hence paid high prices. Jim Penney had a better idea: cash on the barrelhead. More important, at a time when most small-town retailers firmly believed it was good business to make a big profit on small volume, Penney subscribed to a still revolutionary idea; he wanted to make a small profit on each item, thus build big volume and a big profit...
...missed few bets. At night, before locking up, Penney always looked up & down the street so as not to lock out any late customers. By the end of his first year he had grossed $28,898.11-big money for a whistle stop. Soon Penney had surplus cash to buy stores in other towns, looked around for likely local partners. By 1912, he had 34 stores, grossing $2,000,000 a year...