True wealth is built on the foundation of quiet diligence; humility and patience often outpace immediate reward.
“In the year 1873, there was a country-bumpkin who applied for a sales job at a store in upstate New York. He looked like anything but a potential salesman to the owner, who knew 20 other more experienced candidates would soon be applying. But he sensed something sincere about the young man, and said, “Okay. The job is yours. You start Monday!”
Trying to control his excitement, the young man asked, “What are you going to pay me, sir?”
“Pay you!?” the owner said. “You don’t expect me to pay you, do you? Why, you should pay me for teaching you the business.”
So the young man went to work without pay — for three months, from seven in the morning to nine at night. At first they didn’t even trust this farm boy to wait on customers. He just swept the floor and dusted shelves as the other clerks laughed at him.
But those three payless months eventually paid off bigger than the lottery. With the experience he gained in that store after he became a paid employee, Frank Woolworth went out and started his own store — and in the decades to come thousands more.
He became so wealthy that the Woolworth Building in New York, once the tallest skyscraper in the world, was constructed with cash from his personal fortune (a feat that likely has never been duplicated). And he did end up paying the shop owner for teaching him the business, making him a partner in his F.W. Woolworth retail chain.
Reference: Thomas Sowell, Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One (Basic Books, 2004), pp. 35-37
Woolworth Building in New York. Pic courtesy Wikipedia.
The legacy and evolution of the Woolworth empire (Oct. 2026 update)
Frank Winfield Woolworth helped transform retail in the United States after opening his first five-and-dime stores in 1879. His model combined fixed low prices with openly displayed merchandise and large-scale purchasing, making everyday goods more affordable and shopping less dependent on bargaining or a sales assistant’s intervention. Over the following decades, the Woolworth chain grew to more than 5,500 stores worldwide. Woolworth’s early success found a striking expression in Manhattan’s Woolworth Building, which opened in 1913. Standing 792 feet tall, it was then the world’s tallest building and cost $13.5 million, financed in cash.
The retail business later changed direction: its remaining American five-and-dime stores closed in 1997, and the parent company became Venator Group in 1998 before adopting the name Foot Locker, Inc. in 2001. Foot Locker was acquired by DICK’S Sporting Goods in September 2025. In Europe, the Woolworth name continues through the separately owned Woolworth GmbH, which operates in Germany, Austria and Poland and opened its 1,000th European store in March 2026.