Shoppers World Discount Stores was founded in March 1956 with a single store by two ex-New Englanders, Alvin D. Star and Jerome Spier, who worked as buyers for Boston’s legendary Filene’s department store chain. Eager to go into business independently, they first considered opening a chain of ladies’ specialty stores, according to Robert Drew-Bear’s book Mass Merchandising. Upon visiting the super-successful Ann and Hope discount outlet in Cumberland, Rhode Island, they reset their sights on the world of discounts.
After scouting several locations in the greater Boston area, Star and Spier decided to pull up stakes and plant their flag in Chicago instead, where Star’s brother lived. The first store was opened at the intersection of Milwaukee, Foster, and Central Avenues. Shoppers World Number-Two opened in Cicero some months later, followed by a third store in 1958 in Melrose Park. By 1960, a Highland, Indiana store and two more Chicago locations had been added.
The Lincoln, McCormick, and Devon store was in the West Ridge community of Chicago, across the street from Lincoln Village Shopping Center, which opened on August 15, 1962.
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| Pandemonium broke out in this 1962 grand opening of the brand new Shoppers World Discount Store at 6211 North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago. |
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| Similar to the Devon Avenue entrance to Shoppers World. |
The stores sold clothing, housewares, small appliances, and toys. In their early years, like several discount chains, including E.J. Korvette Department Stores, Shoppers World ran afoul of the era’s “fair trade” laws, which allowed manufacturers to set a floor below which prices of certain items could not be set. The company found itself blacklisted by several well-known vendors but seemed to find a creative way around that by setting up a unique “wholesale” organization under a different name to buy from those vendors, then putting the items on sale in the Shoppers World stores. Fortunately for Shoppers World and the rest of the discount store chains, most fair trade laws went the way of dinosaurs by the early sixties.
In 1961, Star and Spier sold their six-store chain to Chicago-based Aldens, the fourth largest catalog retailer in the United States. The new parent company invested heavily in Shoppers World, growing the chain to 14 stores (ranging from 40,000 to 120,000 square feet each). There were no stores in these Chicago suburbs - Mount Prospect, Niles, Oak Lawn, Chicago Heights and Gary, Indiana, as well as downstate Decatur, Illinois and one store in more distant St. Paul, Minnesota.
Aldens itself was acquired at the close of 1964 by Gamble-Skogmo, Inc., owner of several retail chains -Gambles, Skogmos and Tempo, among others, with most of their locations in America’s heartland, and Clark’s and Maclean’s in Canada.
The Shoppers World story wound down quickly from there, with Gamble-Skogmo’s sale of the still 14-store-strong chain in 1967 to Community Discount Stores, whose name the stores took on.
The Lincoln Avenue store became a Zayre after Community’s demise. The Zayre chain closed in 1990 after several years of financial losses.
Next came a Super K Center (Kmart) store, which features a garden center, a video rental store, a branch of a local bank, an arcade, a portrait studio, a Jackson Hewitt tax center, a pharmacy, a grocery store and usually a deli cafe or Little Caesars Pizza station. This store, one of the 326 stores, closed in 2002 and 2003 from a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing.
Home Depot razed the structure at Lincoln Avenue and built a new retail building using one of the standard Home Depot store blueprints. Home Depot is still open at this location.
Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.
