Payless Shoes is back in the podcast spotlight not for its current retail footprint, but for its historical role as a corporate incubator. On a recent episode of How I Built This with Guy Raz, host Guy Raz highlighted the brand's 1990s heyday. He noted that in 1992, Maxine Clark became the president of Payless Shoes, which at the time was "a fast-growing subsidiary of a Fortune five hundred company".
Guy Raz used the history of Payless Shoes to set the stage for Maxine Clark's eventual empire-building with Build-A-Bear Workshop. He pointed out the rarity of her executive rise, reminding listeners that in 1992, "only five percent" of top positions in Fortune 500 companies were held by women, making her tenure at the shoe retailer a pioneering milestone.
While modern retail analysts often focus on the decline of discount brick-and-mortar stores, this retrospective highlights how the massive scale of the May Department Stores company—which Guy Raz described as "a huge, sprawling empire"—served as the ultimate training ground for corporate retail giants before they went independent.