Industry History | W. W. Grainger — Motors Sold from a Cermak Catalog
· 1927-1
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Industry History | W. W. Grainger — Motors Sold from a Cermak Catalog
kevin
People treat Grainger as a Lake Forest campus that always ran a website and a branch for maintenance parts.
The first book was electric motors sold by post.
In 1927 William Wallace Grainger, a University of Illinois engineering graduate, opened a wholesale motor shop on West Cermak Avenue in Chicago.
His sister Margaret worked the early office with him.
The sales tool was a catalog first issued as the MotorBook: a printed list a superintendent could mark and mail instead of walking a supply house floor.
W. W. Grainger, Inc. was incorporated in Illinois in 1928.
A Philadelphia branch opened in 1933 so a customer east of the Alleghenies did not wait on a Chicago crate.
Three more branches followed the next year.
By 1937 annual sales had reached $1 million in 1937 dollars, with offices around the country.
The product line widened from motors to the rest of the maintenance closet: compressors, lamps, fasteners, safety gear.
The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1967 under GWW.
William Grainger retired in 1968 as sales passed $100 million in 1968 dollars; his son David later ran the firm from Skokie and then Lake Forest.
The mechanism is still the 1927 one.
A plant engineer needs a motor or a relay today, not after a factory lead time, and a catalog plus a local branch beats a manufacturer that only sells pallet quantities.
Cermak Avenue in 1927 was industrial South Side, warehouses and the river bridges, not a glass campus.
A visitor walking West Cermak sees later buildings on the same commercial strip.
The MotorBook outgrew the street.
The street is where the book started.
Photo: Chicago Loop streetscape via Wikimedia Commons.
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