WOOLWORTH STORE HERE WILL CLOSE

A variety store which has had a Cape Girardeau connection for almost 80 years is one of more than 700 Woolworth Corp. stores targeted for closure under the latest cutbacks announced by the firm Wednesday.

"We don't have a timetable for closing yet," said Kent Eernisse, manager of the local store, located in the Town Plaza Shopping Center. "But this store will be one of those to be turned over to liquidators."

The local store, a 12,000-square-foot operation which employ 13 people, underwent a complete refurbishing in 1985.

The first F.W. Woolworth here opened in June 1914 at 1 N. Main St. in downtown Cape Girardeau and was the 723rd store in a then-growing retail chain which had been founded by brothers Frank Winfield Woolworth and Charles S. Woolworth in 1912.

The Town Plaza store opened in August 1960 and became the only Woolworth's here when the downtown stored closed in 1977.

Woolworth Corp., one of the nation's most famous retailers, said Wednesday it would close more than 700 stores in North America and eliminate 13,000 jobs over the next several months in a move to improve profits.

Over the past two years, this is the second major cutback undertaken by the company, which made the downtown dimestore a fixture across the American landscape.

Eernisse, a native of Milwaukee, Wis., who has been with the company eight years, including two years at Cape Girardeau, said he had received word that the company will close 720 stores in the U.S. and Canada and will redesign 250 others.

Based in New York, Woolworth is one of the largest retail store chains, with more than 9,000 outlets in North America, Australia, Asia and Europe. The company runs specialty stores such as Foot Locker shoes as well as Woolworth stores.

Company officials told the Associated Press Wednesday that the latest cutbacks would eliminate about 10,000 jobs in the U.S. and 3,000 in Canada, about evenly divided between full-time and part-time positions. This represents 9 percent of the company's total work force.

Woolworth stock rose with word of the cutbacks. In New York Stock Exchange trading, Woolworth was up 37 1/2 cents a share to $26.25.

Woolworth has found many of these stores -- commonly called dimestores or five-and-dimes -- to be increasingly unprofitable, victims of the vast changes that have swept through the retailing industry in recent years.

Many Woolworth dimestores are located in downtowns abandoned by other merchants in favor of suburban shopping malls. Others can't compete with the high-volume, low-cost superstores that have grown at an explosive pace through much of the country.

At the same time, Woolworth has expanded aggressively into so-called specialty stores, which concentrate in a particular area. The company said earlier this year it would spend nearly $400 million to develop more specialty-store formats.

The announcement marks another stage of a cutback by Woolworth that began early last year, when the company began closing 900 money-losing outlets in the U.S., mostly its old-fashioned general merchandise stores.

After founding the company in 1912, F.W. Woolworth a year later built the Woolworth Building in New York City, the tallest structure in the world at the time.

A native of New York, F.W. Woolworth clerked in a village grocery store at Rodman, N.Y., and later with the firm of Moore & Smith in Watertown, N.Y. It was there he came up with the idea of 10-cent stores.

While at Watertown, he suggested putting slow-moving goods on a counter and selling them for a nickel or dime. The venture was successful and led to the idea of a chain of five-and-dime stores founded by F. W. Woolworth and his brother, Charles S. Woolworth.

(Some information for this story was provided by the Associated Press).