It was among the most successful American and international five-and-dime businesses, setting trends and creating the modern retail model that stores follow worldwide today.

The two Woolworth brothers pioneered and developed merchandising, direct purchasing, sales, and customer service practices commonly used today.

The chain went out of business in July 1997, when the company decided to focus primarily on sporting goods and renamed itself Venator Group.

Retail chains using the Woolworth name survived in Austria, Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom as of early 2009.

Woolworth, as the stores popularly became known, was one of the first American retailers to put merchandise out for the shopping public to handle and select without the assistance of a sales clerk.

[3] After working in Augsbury and Moore dry goods store in Watertown, New York, Frank Winfield Woolworth obtained credit from his former boss, William Moore, along with some savings, to buy merchandise and open the "Woolworth's Great Five Cent Store" in Utica, New York, on February 22, 1879.

[1][page needed] The store failed and closed in May 1879, after Woolworth earned enough money to pay back William Moore.

This location, too, was successful, and the brothers continued persuading family members and other associates to join them in forming a "friendly rival syndicate" of five-and-ten-cent stores.

Frank Woolworth provided much of the merchandise, encouraging the rivals to club together to maximize their inventory and purchasing power.

[8][page needed] By 1904, the syndicate had six chains of affiliated stores operating in the United States and Canada, which began incorporating separately during the next few years.

On the newly acquired land, he had a building erected with five floors of offices above a large store, as well as a garden and open-air theater, which soon became the city's social center.

A pioneering early skyscraper, it was designed by American architect Cass Gilbert, a graduate of the MIT architecture school.

After Frank Woolworth's 1919 death, his brother Charles took on the role of chairman of the board, and the company's treasurer Hubert T. Parson took over the presidency.

By 1989, the company was pursuing an aggressive strategy of multiple specialty store formats targeted at enclosed shopping malls.

During the rebuilding and partly as a result of the bad press, the British operation was separated from the parent company as Woolworths plc.

[16] On February 1, 1960, four black students sat down at a segregated lunch counter in a Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth's store.

They were refused service, touching off six months of sit-ins and economic boycotts that became a landmark event in the civil rights movement.

In 1993, an eight-foot section of the lunch counter was moved to the Smithsonian Institution and the store site now contains a civil rights museum, which had its grand opening on Monday, February 1, 2010, the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the sit-ins.

In Roanoke, Virginia on August 27, 1960, two women and a boy "...sat at the lunch counter and ordered a slice of pie, a soda and a sundae, all under the watchful eyes of the biracial committee which had organized the event."

Farah joined the company as chairman and CEO in December 1994 and Hennig was replaced by Dale W. Hilpert as president in May 1995.