Who remembers Kinney Shoes?
Who has your mother dragged to a shoe store to buy a pair of dress shoes you didn’t want because you would have preferred sneakers?

I…I was one.

One of the places I was drawn to was Kinney Shoes… and I haven’t heard from them since. What happened? Where did they go? Not because I wanted to buy shoes there, but because that name just popped into my head – a name I’d forgotten for a few decades – and I wondered what happened to them.

I don’t care what town in Michigan you frequented… there was probably a Kinney’s shoe store there, usually in the malls. Lansing, Jackson, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Battle Creek… oh yeah, and a little town called Detroit.

The GR Kinney Company lasted from 1894 to September 1998. At the age of 28, George Romanta Kinney bought a store in Waverly, New York and began selling shoes at reasonable prices that even those without much money could afford.

In 1936, Kinney Shoes became the largest shoe retailer in the United States with 335 stores nationwide.

In 1963, Kinney sold its stores to Woolworth and renamed itself Kinney Shoe Corporation. These stores existed until 1998, when all 467 Kinney stores were closed. The smaller sister store, Foot Locker, has existed since its opening in 1974 until today.

So the answer to the original question is NO, there are no more Kinney shoe stores in Michigan…or anywhere else in the US. All we have left are the worn out pairs our mothers bought for us, and old commercials on YouTube.

Or check out the photo gallery below which includes pictures of an abandoned shoe store in Kinney.

Kinney Shoes

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No shoes, no shirt, no service