W. T. Grant

W. T. Grant was the founder of a chain of U.S. mass-merchandise stores bearing his name.

The stores were generally of the dime store format located in downtowns. Grants was slower than the Kresge stores to adapt to the growth of the suburb and the change in shopping habits that this entailed. The attempt to correct this was belated; by the late 1960s there were some "Grant City" stores, but unlike Kresge's Kmart they were not of uniform sizes or layouts, meaning that a shopper in one did not immediately feel "at home" in another. The chain's demise in 1975 was in part due to a failure to adopt to changing times but was probably considerably accelerated by managment's refusal until it was too late to eliminate the shareholder dividend; even after the company began to lose money funds were borrowed to pay the quarterly dividend until this became impossible. A last-gasp tactic to stay in business involved each Grant's clerk and cashier to unfailingly offer a Grant's credit card application to customers in order to hopefully boost sales in the stores.

Grant's store-branded electronic and other goods were "Bradford".