Marcy Mandujano has seen retailers come and go.
Years ago, she worked at Zayre, a discount chain that failed in the late 1980s. Then she moved to Ames Department Stores, which abandoned the Chicago market in 1990.
But none of those experiences prepared her for the end of Montgomery Ward & Co., where she has worked for 10 years. The venerable Chicago retailer is closing its doors forever Sunday night after 129 years in business.
Come Monday, Mandujano will no longer see her Wards friends at the Ford City Mall on a daily basis or be able to dispense advice to young employees about boyfriends and parents. The loss also is hitting home on another level. She and her family are losing an inexpensive place to buy household goods, including baby clothes for two new grandchildren.
“We’re just a family here,” sighs Mandujano, a manager in the ladies apparel department. “I’ll miss my friends and the job I did. A lot of customers have been telling us they’re really going to miss the store, too. It was always a good place to shop.”
The sprawling two-story Wards store on Chicago’s Southwest Side is virtually empty now, the carpet bedraggled, the racks and shelves bare. But this Wards store once played an important role in this ethnically mixed community of bungalows and tidy lawns. For more than a quarter-century, it provided good jobs for people like Mandujano and a comfortable one-stop shop for those of modest means.
Wards was a place where recent Latino immigrants could stretch their dollars to buy their first installment of the American dream–overstuffed couches, big-screen televisions and microwave ovens. It also was a place where families–Latino, black, Polish and Irish–could stock up on back-to-school outfits, everything from uniforms to sturdy shoes to winter coats.
And it was a great spot for the area’s senior citizens to buy clothes for themselves and gifts for the grandchildren, followed by a little snack at the mall’s nearby food court.
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Yet while employees such as Mandujano are mourning the demise of Wards’ last 83 stores, its departure from the retail scene is causing little disruption elsewhere. That’s because the retailer’s heyday was actually decades ago when Wards was an innovator and a major force in American retailing.
Once nation’s largest chain
At the beginning of the last century, Wards was mailing 500-page catalogs to more than 1 million American households. That number ballooned to several million by the 1920s. By 1930, the company had 556 retail stores, making it the nation’s largest department store chain.
But Wards fell behind the times during the rapid postwar expansion and languished in the late ’70s and ’80s as a unit of oil giant Mobil Corp. A management-led buyout in 1988 led to a brief resurgence but left Wards saddled with heaps of debt.
In 1990, Wards Chief Executive Bernard Brennan was cocky enough to approach Sears, Roebuck and Co. about a possible takeover. No deal was struck and within five years, Wards’ losses were mounting as new, feistier competitors such as Target Corp. and Kohl’s Corp. offered snazzier merchandise at lower prices.
After a 1997 bankruptcy filing, Wards closed more than a 100 stores, shrinking to 252 stores in 32 states. Its 113-year-old catalog disappeared in 1985.
No one would have faulted Mandujano and her staff if they had jumped ship after learning the store’s fate in late December. Yet not one of her sales associates left despite offers from competitors. They all wanted to stay to the bitter end, ensuring that customers were treated right and the store’s reputation was maintained.
It may be a cliche, but a surprising number of Wards employees say they consider their co-workers and customers a sort of second family. “I have customers who moved to different cities, and when they come back, they look for me,” said Coleen Lacey, who has spent 15 years selling ladies’ apparel. “I had customers come up last week and ask for my phone number because they want to have lunch.”
Just over a week ago, when shoppers were picking through the last bits of merchandise, Mandujano and Lacey were helping customers check out and straightening tables strewn with packages of nylons.
Not far away, Eloise James continued to work her post in the fine jewelry department though most of the gold and diamonds were sold, leaving shoppers to pick over a few silver items.
“I want to be here until the last piece is sold,” said James, 55, who has spent 15 years at Wards. “Then I’ll start crying with everybody else.”
To be sure, there won’t be many people besides Wards employees crying over the retailer’s fate.
Credit cards presaged decline
Customers who were once loyal to Wards because of its easily obtained credit card became fickle once they had a Visa or MasterCard that allowed them to shop anywhere. For most of the 1990s, Wards gave them little reason to come back, allowing its department stores to become cluttered with dated merchandise while management experimented with new retail concepts.
For a while, there appeared to be a cause for hope. In the late 1990s, while under bankruptcy protection, Wards launched a store renovation program that included Ford City. The store received new fixtures, lighting and flooring. The merchandise began to look a little more stylish. Customer service ratings began to improve. Sales jumped by double-digit percentages each month.
However, only about 70 of Wards’ 250 stores were spruced up, and the lift proved inadequate when the economy began to soften last year heading into the holiday season.
Three days after Christmas 2000, Wards’ owner, General Electric Co., lowered the boom: Wards was going out of business forever.
In many parts of the country, where Wards only had a handful of stores, the chain’s departure will barely be noticed. But in its hometown, Wards had 16 stores. None was more of a neighborhood fixture than the giant Wards store at Ford City, a former defense plant that was converted into a mall in 1965.
“It was around for a long time. It gave a sense of security and stability to the area,” said Father Larry Dowling, pastor at St. Denis Parish in the Ashburn neighborhood, a mile southeast of Ford City. “It is a loss to the community.”
Although Wards’ corporate headquarters never donated large sums of money to community groups, the store’s employees reached out on their own. During several holiday seasons, Wards employees contacted Dowling and asked if there were needy families they could help.
Fortunately, there aren’t many poverty-stricken families in St. Denis Parish, Dowling said. The community is mostly made up of hard-working people who are far from rich but make enough to provide for their families without government assistance. Positions at Wards, whether on the sales floor or in managerial ranks, were considered good jobs by St. Denis parishoners.
Certainly, no one is arguing that Wards’ demise will do any significant damage to the Southwest Side’s economy, which is booming right now, thanks in part to the expansion at Midway Airport. But it is a blow to Harry Jablonski, a plumber who has spent 13 years working almost exclusively for Wards.
“I’ve just got to start over and build a reputation again,” said Jablonski, who works for J&S Plumbing in Elk Grove Village. “Things are slow for my company, and we’re still owed $70,000.”
Many Wards workers already have found new jobs. A series of job fairs held by Wards attracted fast-growing companies such as Target and Kohl’s. Some workers are planning to use the end of Wards as a chance to go back to school and learn new skills.
That’s an opportunity that some like Lacey can’t afford. She is playing it safe by taking a second job at night at another retailer in the mall. She hopes that her new employer will increase her hours as soon as she is available.
Area offers shopping options
Wards’ customers will be OK, too. Even if the Wards space remains empty for a while, area shoppers still have three other moderate-price anchor retailers to choose from–Sears, J.C. Penney and Carson, Pirie Scott. Just across Cicero Avenue, there is a Kohl’s and a Target Greatland store, both offering bargains to families on budgets.
But many shoppers say Wards’ departure will leave a void all the same. On Chicago’s Southwest Side, it was almost an institution. Some families proudly identified themselves as “Wards shoppers.”
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“My wife used to enjoy going to Wards,” said Raymond Zagorski, a 40-year resident of the community who likes to sip coffee in the mall’s food court. “My nephew Jerry always swore by Wards. It will be missed.”
Another shopper, Geneva Lynch, wonders where poor families will go to buy clothing and household goods at a reasonable price. At the Lynch home, frugality was more than a virtue, it was a necessity. Her mother, Carrie, raised her sister’s five children in addition to six of her own.
“We used to call ourselves the black Waltons,” Lynch said. “I remember my mother going there for school clothes. My mother used to get us those black and white shoes. You couldn’t tear them up no matter how you tried.”
Annie Mitchell, who works as a bus attendant at nearby Adlai Stevenson School, worries about the downward pull the closing may exert on a neighborhood struggling to find balance amid rapid ethnic change.
“When you take jobs out of the neighborhood, it causes other problems,” Mitchell said. “People start to steal. It’s sad.”
Bernadette Baran, vice president of the West Lawn Chamber of Commerce, doesn’t foresee that kind of drastic fallout. Her concern is much closer to home: She is worried where she will find such a good selection of plus-size clothing for work.
“Their clothes wore well,” said Baran, who has had a Wards credit card for 36 years. “It was a store my daughters and I enjoyed going to.”
Wards employees at Ford City say it was a place they enjoyed going also. In fact, they’re planning a fancy party they’re calling a “prom” as a kind of reunion in coming weeks.
Mandujano and her co-workers say will dress up in formal clothes, rent a banquet room and hire a disc jockey so they can dance all night. They want to celebrate the good times they had at Wards before they move on to new chapters in their lives.