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Woolco was an American-based discount retail chain. It was founded in 1962 in Columbus, Ohio, by the F. W. Woolworth Company. It was a full-line discount department store unlike the five-and-dime Woolworth stores which operated at the time. At its peak, Woolco had hundreds of stores in the US, as well as in Canada and the United Kingdom. While the American stores were closed in 1983, the chain remained active in Canada until it was sold in 1994 to rival Walmart, which was looking to enter the Canadian market. All of the former UK Woolco stores were sold by Kingfisher plc, which had bought the UK Woolworth business, to Gateway which subsequently sold them to Asda.
The company experimented with both Woolco and a more downscale merchandising unit called Worth Mart in the mid-1960s. Woolco was the eventual winner with customers, and the Worth Mart stores were folded into Woolco's store base by the 1970s.
At the outset, Woolco stores were considered by the company to be "promotional department stores", with expanded product lines and other amenities not typically found at namesake Woolworth stores.
Many locations contained Red Grille restaurants, a cafeteria-style outlet, and the food areas sold popcorn, real , and other food.
A number of Woolco stores were opened in the United Kingdom during the same period. One of which opened in Bournemouth on 29 October 1968; in 1970, it was the largest store on one floor in Britain, with an area of 114,000 square feet and parking space for 1,250 cars. The Guinness Book of Records seventeenth edition, published October 1970, page 153
In November 1971, four new stores were opened simultaneously across Canada (including at Marlborough Mall) bringing the total in that country to 47."Woolco department stores opens two more here today", The Calgary Albertan, 24 Nov 1971, p.2
Starting in the late 1970s, Woolworth enacted a cost-saving plan for Woolco that included a reduction in floor space for the largest locations, the elimination of most leased departments and an expansion into smaller markets with stores as small as . During this period, the excess space in some larger Woolco stores went to Woolworth-owned J. Brannam.
J. Brannam, short for "Just Brand Names", was an off-price clothing retailer owned by F.W. Woolworth. Plans for the chain were first made public via a press release in July 1979, which stated the chain would open its first locations in the Oklahoma City and Dallas metro markets, in which there would be three and five locations in each area respectively. All eight of these prototype J. Brannam locations opened on October 24, 1979. Rapid expansion began; by its peak in 1982, the chain had stores as far west as Arizona and as far east as North Carolina. This expansion soon proved too strenuous for the chain, and all locations were shuttered by December 1985, citing "increased competition in discount retailing".
By 1979, it became clear that the earlier cost-saving plan would not be enough to save Woolco from failure, so Woolworth combined the discount store operating unit with its variety stores and began to close stores in unprofitable markets including Chicago.
In 1982, the UK stores were spun off along with the British Woolworths chain in the same year. In 1986, Woolworths sold the Woolco stores to Somerfield, exiting them out of their ownership. Gateway then soon sold the stores again to Asda in 1988. In the UK, Woolworths' then-parent company Kingfisher plc attempted to revive the style of Woolco with the Big W chain in 1999, which was successful but suffered when Woolworths split into its own company in 2001, and in 2004, Woolworths Group PLC scrapped the Big W chain and sold some of the stores to supermarket chains Asda and Tesco. Woolworths rebranded the Big W stores they kept under their own name and they remained until Woolworths' administration in 2008.
In 1990, 26 Woolworth stores in Canada were converted to Woolco because of their larger size. On January 14, 1994, in order to repay the $1.7 billion debt incurred from international specialty store expansion, the Woolworth Corporation sold most of the Woolco Canada stores to Walmart. Walmart did not acquire the Woolco stores that were either unionized or had downtown locations. Some Woolco stores were sold and re-opened as Zellers stores; when Zellers liquidated, some of those stores were later sold to Target Canada, which ceased operations itself in 2015 following bankruptcy.
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