Foot Locker

Early years

In 1963, the F. W. Woolworth Company purchased the Kinney Shoe Corporation and operated it as a subsidiary. In the 1960s, Kinney branched into specialty shoe stores, including Stylco in 1967, Susie Casuals in 1968, and Foot Locker on September 12, 1974. The first Foot Locker opened in the Puente Hills Mall in City of Industry, California. Woolworth also diversified its portfolio of specialty stores in the 1980s, including Afterthoughts, Northern Reflections, Rx Place, and Champs Sports. By 1989, the company pursued an aggressive strategy of multiple specialty store formats targeted at enclosed shopping malls. The idea was that if a particular concept failed at a given mall, the company could quickly replace it with a different concept. The company aimed for ten stores in each of the country's major shopping malls, but this never came to pass as Woolworth never developed that many successful specialty store formats.

In April 1989, the F.W. Woolworth Company reincorporated as a separate company, known as the Woolworth Corporation in the state of New York. The Woolworth Corporation was responsible for the operations of the Foot Locker stores, among the other specialty chains operated by Woolworth's. One of its first moves was the acquisition of Champs Sports and renaming itself the Woolworth Athletic Group.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the F.W. Woolworth Company's flagship department store chain fell into decline, ultimately culminating in the closure of the last stores operating under the name of Woolworth's in the United States in 1997. Deciding to continue aggressive expansion into the athletic business in the following years, the company acquired Eastbay in 1997, which was the largest athletic catalog retailer in the United States, as well as subsequent purchases of regional storefront retailers Sporting Goods (purchased in 1997) and The Athletic Fitters (purchased in 1998). After 1997, Wal-Mart replaced Woolworth in the Dow Jones average. The Woolworth Corporation remained the parent company of Foot Locker, and in June 1998 it changed its name to "Venator Group, Inc." By the 1990s, Foot Locker was responsible for more than 70 percent of Kinney Shoe Corp. sales, while traditional shoe retailer Kinney was in decline. Venator announced shuttering of the remaining Kinney Shoe and Footquarters stores on September 16, 1998; this decision had been preceded by the closure of all Canadian Kinney Shoe stores that April. Matthew Serra became president and COO in 2000.

Rebranding as Foot Locker

As the "Foot Locker" brand had become the Woolworth/Venator company's top performing line, on November 2, 2001, Venator changed its name to Foot Locker, Inc. At that time, Serra became CEO of the company. In 2004, he was also named chairman. In the early 2000s, the majority of Foot Locker stores were renovated and standardized. On November 19, 2004, Foot Locker announced that its quarterly profit rose 19 percent, helped by stronger sales.

In 2004, Foot Locker acquired the Footaction USA brand and approximately 350 stores from Footstar for $350 million (~$555 million in 2024). On April 14, 2004, Foot Locker Inc. announced that it agreed to buy about 350 Footaction stores from bankrupt Footstar Inc. for $160 million (~$254 million in 2024) to expand in urban areas.

On January 10, 2005, the company announced that Nick Grayston was promoted to President and Chief Executive Officer of its

Foot Locker U.S. division, succeeding Tim Finn, who retired from the company.

In 2007, Foot Locker joined with schoolPAX to launch the Foot Locker School Rewards Program, designed to provide charitable donations to schools who sign up and shop at Foot Locker with a custom-coded key tag or school code. Also that year, Foot Locker attempted a revival of the Footquarters name and store format, but put an end to the idea afte only 3 months.

Controversies

On February 12, 1999, a federal jury in Austin awarded $341,000 (equivalent to $601,979 in 2024) to a former Foot Locker shoe store manager who said the company systematically discriminated against its African American employees by offering more opportunities for promotions to white managers.