From the Plant Floor to the Store Window

It opened in 1894 and grew to more than 2,000 stores, most of them stocked with shoes the company made itself. The last 467 closed in 1998.

The smell reached you before anything else, new rubber and cardboard and the faint sweetness of glue.

The sound came next. A stockroom door swinging open, and a stack of boxes coming out sideways in a salesman's arms.

You sat in a low chair with your foot flat on a cold metal plate while a slide moved up against your toe.

Your mother pressed her thumb down at the end of the shoe to measure the room left for growing.

A mirror sat near the floor, angled so a child could watch his own feet turn.

Everything on the wall cost less than it did anywhere else, and nobody in the family ever wondered why.

The store was Kinney Shoes, and it was not, at heart, a shoe store.

George Kinney opened his first one in Waverly, New York, in 1894, and for twenty-five years the chain bought its inventory the way every other retailer did. In 1919 it started buying factories instead. Four that year, another the next.

By 1926 those plants were turning out roughly 14,000 pairs a day and supplying about 60 percent of everything on the shelves.

That changed what the stores were for. They were not there to sell shoes. They were there to sell these shoes.

A manufacturer that owns the storefront skips the wholesaler, the distributor, and the buyer who might say no. The price on the wall could stay low because the shoe had never left the company.

Expansion was not only retail growth. Each new location was another guaranteed outlet for the plants, and full plants made cheap shoes, and cheap shoes filled stores.

The arrangement was valuable enough to attract the government. Brown Shoe bought the chain in 1956, the Justice Department sued, and in 1962 the Supreme Court ordered the deal undone, reasoning that a manufacturer with its own stores would naturally fill them with its own output. Brown sold the chain to Woolworth in 1963 for $45 million.

The loop kept turning for another fifteen years. In 1978 the company ran fourteen plants producing 53,000 pairs a day, and by 1980 it had grown to 2,115 stores.

Then the arithmetic holding the loop together came apart. Shoes made in Asia landed at prices no American plant could match, and the factories that had been the advantage became the most expensive part of the business.

The second change was harder to answer. Customers stopped buying anonymous shoes. They wanted a name on the side, a stripe, a logo they had seen during the game.

A chain built to move its own unbranded production had nothing to put in that window. The plants closed one at a time. Five were left by 1989 and three by 1994, together making about 13,000 pairs a day, roughly a quarter of the peak.

The company had seen some of this coming. In 1974 it opened a small sports specialty division near Los Angeles that sold nothing but other companies' athletic shoes.

The family shoe stores emptied out across the nineties. By 1991 the chain was down to 1,312 locations, and about 600 more were shut over the following two years.

In September 1998 the parent company announced it was closing all 467 that remained.

The little division from 1974 was by then the largest athletic footwear retailer in the country. In 2001 the parent gave up its own name and took the division's instead, becoming Foot Locker.

Owning the factory is an advantage only while the factory is the cheap way to make the thing. After that it is a building the company still has to pay for.

The retailers that survived the shift sold what customers asked for by name and let someone else own the machines.

The chain that made its own shoes is gone. The store it started sells everybody else's.