and the change in shopping habits that this entailed. The attempt to correct this was belated; in the 1960s and early 1970s, the company built many larger stores (later known as Grant City), but unlike Kresge's Kmart they lacked uniform size and layout, so that a shopper familiar with one did not immediately feel "at home" in another. Grants' delay in building out its network of larger stores afforded rivals an opportunity to secure the most desirable building sites, leaving Grants with less preferable locations, often with inadequate selling space. After the company began to lose money, funds were borrowed to pay the quarterly dividend until this became impossible. A final tactic to stay in business involved requiring Grant's clerks and cashiers to offer a Grant's credit card application to customers to boost sales in the stores. W. T. Grant's bankruptcy in 1976 which was the then-second biggest in US history, was in part due to a failure to adapt to changing times but was probably accelerated by management's refusal until it was too late to eliminate the shareholder dividend. While there is some argument over exactly which combination of decisions caused this, all these decisions were made by an unchecked management layer and the bankruptcy is considered the "beginning of the end" of the idea that US company directors had complete control over their company and no obligation to the company's shareholders to make 'the best' decisions to maintain the company value and survival. The most apparent cause of the bankruptcy was the company's decision to extend store credit to all customers, with no attempt made to assess the customer's ability to repay. Each of the company's stores had credit managers who authorized the opening of store credit accounts, which resulted in many customers having credit accounts with more than one of the company's stores. In addition, there existed no centralized control or record-keeping of store credit accounts which resulted in noncollectable accounts. The credit was recovered in 1976 by Irwin Jacobs who, with the backing of Carl Pohlad, purchased their consumer accounts receivable account of $276.3 million for $44 million and 5% of first-year sales. This initiative to extend credit to all customers was made in 1969, during a prosperous period in US history, when Grant was expanding into new areas of the US. W. T. Grant hoped to attract customers from rival Kresge and other department stores.