Word: ward
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...line retailer was founded in 1872 in Chicago by Aaron Montgomery Ward, a salesman who presciently anticipated the potential in mail-order sales to farmers. Later that year he published the first comprehensive general- merchandise catalog, 22 years before Richard Sears did. It was one of the last times Montgomery Ward was ahead of Sears...
...company, known affectionately to its customers as Monkey Ward, grew rapidly at first, but then became stagnant. From 1941 to 1957, it did not open a single new store, while Sears moved aggressively into the booming suburbs of postwar America. When recession and high interest rates rocked retailing in the 1970s, Montgomery Ward could no longer hang on alone. After Mobil took it over, the retailer earned $105 million in 1978, but it soon slipped into the red again. The company was too big, too mismanaged, too out of tune with what consumers wanted. In 1981 Stephen Pistner, president...
...cutting distribution centers from 150 to 33. In 1983 the company earned a paltry $40 million on $6 billion in sales, and last year it made $54 million on almost the same amount. In contrast, Sears earned $1.5 billion on sales of $38.8 billion. After launching the Montgomery Ward reorganization, Brennan left to run Household Merchandising, the company that embraces T.G.&Y. and Ben Franklin variety stores. The president's job at Montgomery Ward opened up in January, when Pistner resigned to become senior vice president of the Rapid- American retail empire...
Brennan plans to push forward the policies he helped initiate at Montgomery Ward. Says he: "I'm very excited about going back and continuing the strategies that we started when I was there before. Our real focus is on merchandise, improving the products we offer." To make Montgomery Ward more profitable, he will probably reduce the payroll still further from the present 78,000 and perhaps close as many as 300 of the 2,099 catalog outlets. He will probably concentrate the firm's efforts in the Midwest, its strongest region...
Mobil Chairman Rawleigh Warner Jr., who began his company's involvement with ( Montgomery Ward, may be watching it end from a distance. He announced last week that he will step down as chairman next year, when he reaches 65, to be replaced by Allen Murray, 54, the current president...