Word: daytons
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...Dayton's has been an aggressive outfit since its establishment in 1902 by Minneapolis Banker George Draper Dayton. He lured shoppers with slickly conceived newspaper ads and free food, thought nothing of hiring an airplane to deluge the Minnesota State Fairgrounds with a million blue feathers inscribed with Dayton's name. By the time the store came under control of third-generation family members in 1950 (the elder Dayton died in 1938), it accounted for 16% of all furniture and apparel sales in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. That would have satisfied most merchants...
...Dayton heirs were far from content...
...started with the assumption," says Bruce Dayton, 50, George's grandson and the company president since 1965, "that the independent department store was a dying breed of cat. We knew we had to form a growth company or be absorbed." Dayton's thus expanded rapidly into new lines and locations. It opened its first branch in Rochester, Minn., in 1954, two years later put up one of the country's first fully enclosed, air-conditioned shopping centers in a Minneapolis suburb. It soon added another shopping center, is now building two more...
...Whole Pie. Besides adding new stores of its own, Dayton's last year bought up San Francisco's fashionable Shreve & Co. jewelry store, and earlier this year acquired the two Diamond department stores in Phoenix, Ariz., and the four-store Lipman chain in Oregon. Long committed to the "whole pie" theory of retailing, which emphasizes bargain-basement as well as high-fashion merchandise, the company is also expanding its six-year-old chain of Target discount stores, a $100 million-a-year operation that has outlets in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri. The most impressive growth has come...
...Dayton's has fully computerized its B. Dalton operation to keep track of fastand slow-moving titles, meanwhile taking pains to make the chain seem like a group of friendly neighborhood booksellers. Most B. Dalton ads use the first person to proclaim "I am having a sale," or "I see a growing interest in the occult." Mixing mechanization with the personal touch is a Dayton's hallmark that has paid off for the company as a whole. Last year Dayton's had sales of $265,507,000 and profits of $9,587,000, a gain of some...