The Boomin' Winn-Dixie

“Not much time for banjo strummin’
For the mills are busy hummin’
Pine tree crops – citrus, cattle –
And chemicals, too,
Cover Dixie like the dew!
Our food business, too, is zoomin’
‘Cause this NEW Southland’s
really boomin’!”

- advertising verse from 1955

Up until the mid-20th century, it would be accurate to say that the industrial production of the Southern states lagged behind other parts of the country. This was the era before the “rust belt” became rusty, and a majority of manufactured goods still came from above the Mason-Dixon Line. Take a look at most any mass produced item from that time, and if it lists a city of origin, it’s likely as not to read “Chicago”, “Rochester, N.Y.”, “Cinti, O. (Cincinnati)” or some other northern or upper Midwest location. Although many companies had established west coast branch factories to save on freight costs, the output of the South remained mostly agricultural in nature, with relatively few exceptions.

Around the mid-1940’s, this began to change rapidly. The lower operating costs of the largely non-union South formed a powerful enticement for companies to expand or relocate there. Civic leaders of towns large and small bent over backwards to offer low tax rates and cheap, plentiful, rail-accessible land on which sprawling single–story manufacturing plants (with acres of parking space) could be built. As a result, many major companies forsook their old, inefficient, multi-story urban factories in cold climes and built gleaming new facilities among the green-meadowed landscapes of places where winter coats wore out far less frequently.

Of course, all of this new development required a workforce, which came from a number of sources. First, many local area workers left the family farm to work in the new factories. Secondly, a large number of northern workers, of both blue and white collar persuasions, relocated to the South, where opportunity beckoned. By the mid-50’s, hundreds of companies had planted their flags there. The textile industry (clothing, carpet, towels, linens, etc.), which already had a significant presence there, moved south in near entirety during those years. Chemicals, aerospace and other forms of high technology would be welcomed into the mix as well. By the mid-50’s, the phrase “New South” had come into widespread use (which continued well into the 1970’s) to describe the new boomland.

Winn-Dixie, an enthusiastic corporate cheerleader for the New South, was eager to capitalize on this growth, continuing to expand aggressively both through acquisition and new store construction through the rest of the 1950’s. In June 1956, the company purchased Ketner-Milner Stores, a 24-unit chain of supermarkets in the Salisbury and Raleigh, North Carolina areas. Ketner-Milner had only been formed the previous year, with the merger of the 10-store Ketner’s Supermarkets and Milner’s Piggly Wiggly.

Interestingly, the Ketner-Milner transaction became the impetus behind what would eventually emerge as a formidable competitor to Winn-Dixie. While Glenn Ketner accepted a vice presidency at Winn-Dixie, his brother Ralph soon resigned, eager to control his own destiny in the food business. In 1957, Ralph Ketner, along with another brother, Brown, and Wilson Smith opened the first Food Town supermarket in Salisbury. Growing slowly at first, Food Town (later renamed Food Lion) would become a dominant player over time.

And Winn-Dixie was expanding in the other direction as well – just after the Ketner-Milner buyout, the company acquired H.G. Hill Stores, a 42-store chain that brought the company into New Orleans, Baton Rouge and other key Louisiana markets, as well as Hattiesburg, Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi.

All the while, the company continued to build new stores, averaging some 60 a year by the end of the decade. A 1959 Consumers Research magazine article featured a humorous quote from Winn-Dixie president A.D. Davis on the company’s “scientific” approach to determining ideal new store locations: “We have a radar detector device that picks up diapers on the line in the back yard, and when a great amount of diapers appear on the radar screen as we are driving through a certain area, we know this is the place where we ought to have a store”.

Obviously, whatever they were doing was paying off. In mid-1960, Winn-Dixie had over 500 stores, organized into the following divisions – Montgomery, Alabama – 55 stores, New Orleans – 43 stores, Greenville, S.C. – 110 stores, Raleigh, N.C. – 54 stores and Louisville – 33 stores. Then of course were the Florida divisions: Jacksonville – 83 stores, Miami – 76 stores and Tampa – 60 stores. If the benefits of the “New South” industrial boom may have been felt to a lesser extent in Florida, they were more than offset by the burgeoning tourist economy. In this regard, the best was yet to come.

In many areas, it must have seemed that new Winn-Dixies (and Kwik Cheks) were popping up all over. Those diapers flapping in the breeze were a sure sign one was on the way.

The photos above, from the Florida Photographic Collection, show an interesting variety of Winn-Dixie stores from the late 1950’s. The locations are as follows: (1) a brand new Tallahassee store, 1959, (2) Cedar Hills Shopping Center store, Jacksonville, also 1959, (3) Lakewood Shopping Center, pictured here previously, Jacksonville, 1959 again, (4) a downtown location in Deland, FL, 1956, and lastly, (5) from 1959, a close up of an older Tallahassee location, quaint with its oil-stained curbside parking spaces, “guess your weight” machine and wooden doorframes. The names of two well-known Winn-Dixie brands, Dixie Darling and Astor, are painted on the transom glass. More indicators (as if more are needed) that this scene is from a long-gone era can be found in the price of the Dixie Darling bread – the "...and a half-cent" price, along with the very fact that any price would be painted on glass. Definitely from a pre-inflationary era.

Sears, Roebuck and America

Sears didn't have a single retail location for nearly the first forty years of its existence. Founded in 1886 by Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck, the company established its initial reputation and fame as a “catalog supply house”, shipping all manner of goods to (mostly rural) locations all over the country from its Chicago headquarters. Along with its chief competitor Montgomery Ward, founded eight years earlier and also based in Chicago, Sears sold a vast variety of clothing, tools, books and Bibles, farm supplies, livestock, camping supplies, groceries and on and on out of a huge catalog, issued annually, often exceeding 1000 pages, and selling for 50 cents to $1 at a time when that was a fair amount of money. By the early 30’s, catalog volume had grown so much that the company had added distribution “plants” in Kansas City, Atlanta, Memphis, Los Angeles and several other cities to augment the output of their Chicago home base.

Alvah Roebuck retired in 1895 (he would return to the company in a PR role for a brief period in the early 1930’s after some personal financial reversals), selling out his interest to Sears. That year, Sears took on a new partner, Julius Rosenwald, who infused the company with badly needed cash and installed a system of management controls that would help facilitate Sears’ phenomenal growth in the coming decades. The most important move Rosenwald made had nothing to do with policies or procedures, however, but with the hiring of an individual, General Robert Elkington Wood, who would reshape the direction and destiny of the company.

A West Point grad who would as part of his military career help oversee the excavation of the Panama Canal, Wood would retire from the military after World War I as a Brigadier General, beginning a career in 1919 with Montgomery Ward. Wood observed early on that the American population was migrating from rural to urban life. He pushed Ward to open store locations to take advantage of this trend, which they began to do at an exceedingly slow place and chose, to Wood’s chagrin, to use the stores as a dumping ground for inferior merchandise and closeouts. Frustrated by what he saw as resistance to his ideas at Ward, Wood was receptive when Sears’ Rosenwald came calling. Wood hired on at Sears as a Vice President in 1924. Four years later, he was named president and in 1939, he would become company chairman.

In 1925 Sears opened its first store in a corner of their Chicago mail-order plant. Wood saw to it that more stores followed at a fast pace, giving Sears a total of over 350 stores by 1930. The following year, 1931, store sales overtook catalog sales for the first time. Sears continued to open retail stores aggressively through the start of World War II, when (as with most all chains) new construction ground to a halt by necessity.

Another Wood initiative was the introduction of a line of tires (initially manufactured for Sears by Goodyear) and automotive accessories under the brand name “Allstate” in the late 1920’s. A most unusual extension of the Allstate product line was introduced in 1931 – car insurance. The Allstate Insurance Company, at Wood’s behest, was set up as a wholly-owned subsidiary that year, and for its first 25 years sold only auto insurance. In the late 1950’s, Allstate wrote its first life insurance policy. By the early 60’s, Allstate was a billion-dollar business in and of itself.

Once WWII ended, Wood, true to form, pushed Sears to the forefront of postwar retail expansion. Three major factors, among others, were now in play – first, a large percentage of the population was now shifting from urban locales to rapidly-growing suburban areas. Secondly, major regional shopping centers and the earliest malls were now being built, and thirdly, the explosive growth of the Southern, Southwestern and Pacific Coast markets begged increased presence there. Sears, under Wood’s leadership and that of his hand-picked successors, rose to the challenge in all three respects.

General Wood retired from the chairmanship of Sears in 1954. The next year, Wood was the first living individual to be named to the Retailing Hall of Fame, joining the ranks of John Wanamaker, George Huntington Hartford (founder of A&P) and Marshall Field, among other legends. Wood remained an active member of Sears’ board until 1968. He then became “Honorary Chairman”, a designation he held until he passed away at the age of 90 in 1969. Wood was posthumously honored alongside Marshall Field in the naming of northwest suburban Chicago’s massive Woodfield Mall, (which was co-developed by Sears and opened in 1971), a fact that is probably lost on most Woodfield shoppers and was something I was certainly unaware of during the years I shopped there.

The photos above are circa 1951, and show some of the larger Sears stores opened in the first few years of Sears’ postwar boom, a period that to my observation appears to have extended through the late sixties, give or take a few years. The first photo is of the North Hollywood store (here’s a color close-up), the second is of the San Francisco store on Geary Blvd., which a commenter on the previous post kindly informs had a restaurant on the top level and is now a Best Buy/Mervyn’s combination. The remaining stores, in order, are from Dayton, OH, Raleigh, NC, Wilmington, DE, Waco, TX, and Springfield, MA. Note the "Allstate" auto center in the last photo.