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Never quite understood the affection some here have for MW.  Growing up I always felt it was a cheap knock off of Sears and Sears was a knock off of our regional department store Hudson's.  It was pretty rare for our family to shop at Wards, stuff always felt a little cheaper and "off" compared to stuff from Sears or Hudson's.  Kind of like the Walmart of it's day.

 

I wonder why some company would try to reinvent MW in this day and age.  Younger people have no idea of Wards, it's been gone a long time.
 
Our resident Montgomery Ward groupie out of Tucson advised in another thread a while back (I think the subject was a small, new MW washer) that there is no relation to the Monkey Wards that went bankrupt lo, those many years ago.   It's just an on-line brand and not an actual retailer these days.

 

Matt, you have nailed it in your description of Monkey Wards.  Growing up, ours was a Go-Ward household (the west coast flagship store in Oakland had the store name spelled out in huge neon atop their several story tall store and distribution center -- at night it would alternately light up with "MONTGOMERY WARD" and "GO WARD").  There was no love lost with me when they finally shut down.

 

Here's a picture of the Oakland store's shot-up empty shell, awaiting its planned adaptive re-use as housing, but it never happened.  It's been gone for many years.

[this post was last edited: 8/30/2016-23:26]

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Didn't Margaret Cho have a bit about going to Montgomery Ward's when she was growing up?

I can't ever remember going in one as a kid - there wasn't one in the loop or mall we would go to, so everything was Sear's or Marshall Field's (with Carson's and JCP thrown in for good measure), but I too had that feeling of their being a bit "cut rate" whether they were or not.
 
" . . . there wasn't one in the loop . . ."

No surprise there.  I always felt Wards belonged in the low rent district.  They'd have just tainted the grand State Street image if they were in there along with finer stores like Field's and CPS.
 
Order arrived today

I just received my order that I placed with Montgomery Ward. Fast shipping. When i talked to the gal at customer service she said that they are still the original Montgomery Ward. When they went out of business they kept the rights to the catalog and sold off everything else. Good people to deal with.
 
Wait a minute....

Now that I think about it there was one in the loop somewhere, but we never went there. I mean, we had Wieboldt's and Goldblatt's - hardly 'high end upper bracket top drawer' stores... And Sear's.
 
Their HQ was backed up to the river somewhere across from N. Canal St. in the area behind the Merchandise Mart, I think.  Maybe they had a store there that was part of the HQ complex.
 
No, I think there was a store on State Street - a newish building from the mid-60's in fact. Long gone at this point.

Their warehouse and HQ (a 60's high-rise) are all condominiums today. The river facing buildings are not bad - high ceilings and balconies overlooking the river.
 
I don't remember ever seeing a Wards anchor store in a mall where I grew up, but in the 70s/80s the smaller catalog stores with a very small floor space were fairly common. Usually had an auto service bay and sold tires as well. In the spring/summer there would be mowers out in the floor space. I think Wards heyday for big anchor stores was the 60s/early 70s.
 
Wards

was not low rent by any means. Very middle class. Tappan made their stoves, Norge their washers and dryers, Eureka most of their vacuums. A few were Hoover. Admiral made their refrigerators. They also had their own service dept. They sold some high quality "Style House" furniture also.
So while Sears may have had better laundry appliances, and better Whirlpool refrigerators, their stoves by Roper were comparable, and their Ryobi, then Panasonic sourced vac's were mostly plastic well before any Eureka.
Apparel collections were comparable.
They had a few stores as Mall anchors in smaller malls. A Wards store built after 1950 was always near a newer middle class subdivision.
 
Sorry, don't agree.  Wards was always the cheap alternative to other department stores.  Their products always seemed a little "off", a little cheaply made. Their appliance graphics always bordered on tacky.  At least that was my perception growing up, it was the Woolworth or Kmart of department stores.
 
Wards was not popular in this area; in fact, I don't remember them having any stores in the Cincinnati or Dayton area. They may have at some point in time, but I never saw any. I know they had a small store in Bowling Green, OH as my sister's mother-in-law mentioned working in one there. I'm thinking the building is now a restaurant. Think they also had them in Columbus, as one of my dad's cousins worked in one.

Some of their appliances were Westinghouse, including laundry and ranges, and Eureka vacs as mentioned.
 
Montgomery Ward was frozen after WW2...the old man who was in charge thought that we were facing a depression so in the ten years after the war they shrunk their store base slightly. Meanwhile, Sears was growing in suburbia and Penney was growing it's dry goods business. From 1955 to about 1958 they decided to finally grow and started clustering their markets (which resulted in spotty coverage...present in Chicago and Kansas City but nothing in St. Louis. In the 1958-1965 timeframe they accelerated into suburban malls, but were shunted to the secondary /lower class malls because Sears and the local department stores locked up the Class 1 malls.
 
Matt and Jamie, you both nailed it.

 

Around here, it was closer to 1970 when Wards began building brand new stores in second-rate malls.  Can you say, "Scotch Boutique?"   The stores looked cheap and uninspired inside and out from day one -- a perfect match for the mainly unappealing appliances Matt described above.    Sears was ahead of Wards by a good 15 years or more with big, architecturally appealing stores, no small number of which were free-standing.  Why anchor a mall when your store housed everything under the sun?

 

It was only during later expansion periods that Sears opted for real estate in new or existing malls -- the big regional types, not the low rent borderline strip malls that Wards chose.

 

You be the judge.*  Where would you rather shop?

 

Here?

 

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Or here? 

 

*Sorry, AZ residents not eligible to participate.

 

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Literally the only class A mall anywhere I can think of where Wards went in was in Overland Park, Kansas (Oak Park Mall) ...nearly everywhere else it was secondary malls at best. I worked for the company that handled Montgomery Ward's credit services from 1989-1992 (General Electric Capital)...they may have had some class A malls in California, but mostly the cra**y malls. They were very early adopters of the ancillary services (credit insurance, service contracts,...) plus 18% interest...there wasn't much money being made at the retail side of things.
 
Down In The South Of FLA...

Montgomery Wards was branded Jefferson Wards or simply Jeffersons. Not sure what the relationship was between the 2(3). Anybody know?

Malcolm
 
Everything

is different from those days.
There are but a few independent department stores left. Most are conglomerated under Macy's. They even changed the Federated parent holding co. to Macy's.
The Broadway stores in southern California built a large store in the Century City shopping center. This was the old twentieth Century Fox studio back lot.
The city of Los Angles paid Fox big money for the property and made it the best modern urban renewal project in the country.
Today, Westfield of Australia operates the mall, and the former Broadway store is Macy's.
 
We had two Montgomery Ward stores near us when I was growing up. The first was in Dearborn - the store was built in the 30's and had a Georgian style to it. We shopped there from time to time, but most of our shopping was done at either J.L. Hudson's or Crowley's - two local department stores. The old Dearborn Wards was open until they went out of business, and then the city didn't want to redevelop the building siting lead paint, lots of asbestos and other contaminants so they tore it down.

 

In 1959 they opened a bigger brand-new Wards at the Wonderland shopping mall, which we went to very often as it was fairly close by. I member my dad buying a Wards lawnmower (I don't know what company made them - but it was a gas powered rotary blade and he had it for years) and I purchased a Wards branded color TV in the early 80's - I think it was a rebranded GE.

 

Here's the Dearborn store and the Wonderland store:

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(threadjacking in progress)

Sears was way ahead in their store design, once they started building stores, and location scouting. They were one of the first do automobile centered stores with large parking lots, even in the teens and certainly by the 20's, in outer areas of cities and by the 30's and 40's were very creative with store design - one of their Washington DC stores and an LA store come to mind (there is an excellent article in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians on just this subject). By the late 50's they started locating in malls because the stand alone stores didn't attract as much business as well as it being easier to have someone else do the initial development - it was hypothesized that this period is when their retail reach started to wane along with their design innovation which had been in both interior and exterior design, site and space planning as well as merchandising within the stores.
 
My grandmother was a Hudson's shopper. She'd save up for a new dress, buy something top of the line, bring it home and dress number six went bye bye (to charity usually). She was draconian in keeping her wardrobe size constant. She had NO casual clothes other than a housedress or two for around the house.
 
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