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.