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Foot Locker

Foot Locker, Inc. (NYSE: FL) is a major American sportswear and footwear retailer, with its headquarters in New York City, and operating in approximately 20 countries worldwide. It is the successor corporation to the F.W. Woolworth Company (“Woolworth’s”). Foot Locker, Inc. operates the eponymous “Foot Locker” chain of athletic footwear retail outlets (along with “Kids Foot Locker” and “Lady Foot Locker” stores), Champs Sports, Footaction USA, and Eastbay/Footlocker.com Eastbay/Footlocker.com own the rights to Final Score, ESPN Shop, NBA Store, AFL Store, and The United States Olympic Shop.

According to the company's filings with the SEC, as of January 28, 2006, Foot Locker, Inc. had 3,921 primarily mall-based stores in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia Pacific (including Australia and New Zealand).

In 1963, Woolworth 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 in 1974.

Woolworth also diversified its portfolio of specialty stores in the 1980s, including Afterthoughts, Northern Reflections, and Champs Sports. By 1989, the company was pursuing 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 10 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 1989, the F.W. Woolworth Company incorporated a separate company called 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.

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. That year, Wal-Mart replaced Woolworth in the Dow Jones average. The Woolworth Corporation remained the parent company of Foot Locker, and in 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 the shuttering of the remaining Kinney Shoe and Footquarters stores on September 16, 1998.

As the “Foot Locker” brand had became the Woolworth/Venator company’s top performing line, on October 20, 2001 Venator changed its name to Foot Locker, Inc.

In 2004, Foot Locker acquired the Footaction USA brand and approximately 350 stores from Footstar for $350 million dollars.

Source: Wikipedia - News Reports

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