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ON THE MORNING JAMES CASH PENNEY opened his first Arkansas store in 1923, the mastermind of Walmart was just five years old, and the founder of Dillard's had yet to see his ninth birthday.1 At the same time, the lives of Arkansas department store magnates Joseph Pfeifer, Gus Blass, and Mark Matthias Cohn were all coming to an end, while prominent national retailers such as Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward were still only selling merchandise via catalog, with no conventional department store presence.2 The very idea of a national department store chain operating in Arkansas, much less a store that sold quality merchandise at everyday low prices, was still a novelty. Yet Penney's first Arkansas location, on Garrison Avenue in downtown Fort Smith, would be a harbinger of many more to come.3 Between 1923 and 1941, James Cash Penney would bring his department store to the downtowns of nearly twenty Arkansas cities, where the company's small-town customer service and "golden rule" values allowed Penney's to thrive despite a tide of regional anti-chain store sentiment. Not only did J. C. Penney stores serve customers on Arkansas's main streets for the better part of fifty years, they also paved the way for future retail empires that would eventually spread across the state and, in some cases, the nation. Penney's innovations in bringing his shoppers quality merchandise at low prices through volume purchasing, as well as standardizing best practices for merchandising, advertising, and customer service, continue to foster successful retail chains, which today operate well beyond the central business districts initially favored by Penney's. The fate of Penney's downtown stores reflects, in turn, the shifting geography of commerce in modern America.
Historian Bethany Moreton has explored how socioeconomic and cultural factors in postwar Arkansas enabled Sam Walton to drastically change consumer culture and chain store retailing, particularly after he began expanding his retail empire out of Bentonville in the late 1950s.4 It is important to note, however, that J. C. Penney was operating his Arkansas stores on similar principles for more than twenty years before Walton opened his first Ben Franklin franchise in 1945-adjacent, incidentally, to a J. C. Penney store in Newport, Arkansas. Indeed, two decades before Walton unveiled the first Wal-Mart, he and his brother Bud...