[1] At the company's end, headquarters were atop One Astor Plaza, a prominent building of New York City's skyline on Times Square.
In return for this, the "Grant Company [was] making available to Zellers its experience on matters of merchandise, real estate, store development, and general administration".
Zellers employees were sent to Grant stores and head office for training and together they made common buying trips to Asia, a practice that benefited both companies.
The attempt to correct this was belated; in the 1960s and early 1970s, the company built many larger stores (later known as Grant City), but unlike Kresge's Kmart they lacked uniform size and layout, so that a shopper familiar with one did not immediately feel "at home" in another.
After the company began to lose money, funds were borrowed to pay the quarterly dividend until this became impossible.
W. T. Grant's bankruptcy in 1976 which was the then-second biggest in US history, was in part due to a failure to adapt to changing times but was probably accelerated by management's refusal until it was too late to eliminate the shareholder dividend.
[4] This initiative to extend credit to all customers was made in 1969, during a prosperous period in US history, when Grant was expanding into new areas of the US.