20 Businesses That Boomed During History’s Worst Economic Crashes

By 1935, Parker Brothers, a veteran board-game maker, was on the verge of bankruptcy. It secured the rights to sell Monopoly after sales of Charles Darrow’s version began to soar in Pennsylvania, but Darrow’s version of the game was actually based on an earlier patent by Elizabeth Magie in 1904. Parker Brothers went on to sell 278,000 copies in 1935 and 1.75 million in 1936.

The Panic of 1873 caused oil prices to collapse, and the country entered a six-year depression. John D. Rockefeller, head of Standard Oil, used cash reserves to purchase struggling refineries in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, and throughout Pennsylvania’s oil regions from 1873 to 1879, increasing his share of refining capacity from approximately 30% in 1870 to approximately 90% in 1879. The Panic did not weaken Standard Oil. It was the catalyst for the creation of the monopoly.

Jay Hormel, head of Hormel Foods, introduced Spam in 1937. It was canned, spiced pork and ham and didn’t require refrigeration, an advantage in 1937 because not every family had a refrigerator at home. The product was sold directly to families on a budget, and by 1940, a year before the U.S. joined the war, about 70% of households had used Spam.

As national auto production nosedived in the Depression, Chevrolet was selling its six-cylinder “Stovebolt”-equipped cars for almost as much as Ford’s four-cylinder Model A. Chevy sold more cars than Ford in 1931, taking the number-one spot in the US. Overall industry sales were going down, but Chevy just got a bigger share of the shrinking market.

In April 1930, James Dewar, a manager at Continental Baking, found that its machines for making strawberry shortcake sat unused for 46 weeks a year. He came up with a solution: use the machines to make cheap sponge cakes, inject them with banana cream, sell two for a nickel, and call them “Twinkies.” It wasn’t until 1942, when banana cream became difficult to source during the war, that vanilla took over as the filling.

IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson Sr. maintained production until well into the early 1930s, storing tabulators (electromechanical punch-card processing machines) in warehouses. He was confident that the demand for organizational information management would continue to increase. With the passage of the Social Security Act in August of 1935, the U.S. government suddenly required a way to keep track of records for more than 26 million workers, and IBM was the only supplier that had any units on hand.

When Pepsi came out of bankruptcy in 1931, it was struggling to survive. In 1934, Pepsi’s president, Charles Guth, attempted a simple strategy: Sell 12-ounce bottles for a nickel instead of Coca-Cola’s 6.5 ounces for a nickel. The company’s profits doubled from 1936 to 1938 thanks to the bigger bottle, and Pepsi’s radio jingle, “Nickel, Nickel,” which hit the airwaves in 1939, gave the brand a further boost. Coke still outsold Pepsi overall. But Pepsi had found a way to survive.

In response to the 1929 stock market crash, Post Cereal trimmed back on advertising to conserve money. The CEO of Kellogg’s, W.K. Kellogg, did the exact opposite. He doubled his company’s advertising budget and invested heavily in radio ads to promote Rice Krispies (launched in 1928). Kellogg’s earnings climbed by approximately 30 percent during the early 1930s. Post, then the cereal category leader, remained in business, but ceded its industry dominance for decades to come.

When Denmark’s construction boom fizzled in 1932, Ole Kirk Christiansen, a Danish carpenter, found himself without any customers for his primary line of business: homes. So he began crafting inexpensive wooden toys such as yo-yos and pull-along ducks out of scraps. In 1934, he called the company Lego, after the Danish leg godt (“play well”). Plastic bricks were still over 10 years away.

In the Panic of 1873, while rival mill owners closed their furnaces and defaulted on loans, Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, had money in his pocket. That year he began construction of the Edgar Thomson Steel Works in Braddock, Pennsylvania, buying up cheap materials, labor, and distressed partners. The plant began operations in 1875 with a new, faster and more cost-effective steelmaking process called the Bessemer process. It sold rails below the price of every competing mill.

In 1932, Charles Revson, his brother Joseph Revson, and chemist Charles Lachman launched Revlon with a $300 investment. Rather than sell the traditional transparent dyes for fingernails, Lachman produced an opaque formula based on pigments that guaranteed a uniform finish. Marketed via beauty salons (there was a big demand because of the new craze for permanent-wave styles), Revlon turned into a multimillion-dollar concern by 1939.

In the Depression, Frank Mars, whose company already sold the Milky Way bar, added two more bars: Snickers in 1930 and 3 Musketeers in 1932. Both cost five cents. They were marketed as filling, satisfying snacks offering real food value for a nickel. The company’s growing sales allowed Mars to build an expanded factory in Chicago. No M&M’s yet; those weren’t introduced until 1941.

Allstate Insurance was created in April 1931 by Sears, Roebuck & Co. at the suggestion of Sears executive Carl Odell, and overseen by company president Robert E. Wood. Allstate offered auto insurance directly through the mail and Sears retail catalogs without relying on the services of commissioned agents, and the resulting cost savings were passed to customers in the form of lower insurance premiums. By 1933, Allstate had made a profit of $93,000, and by 1939, it had more than 113,000 active policies.

C.F. Martin & Co., a guitar maker, saw sales of pricey mandolins and fancy guitars plummet in the Depression. Martin retooled its catalog between 1931 and 1934 to offer a bigger and deeper-bodied guitar, the Dreadnought. The company introduced models like the D-18 and D-28, built to project loudly with plenty of bass. Musicians playing country and folk music, and performing live on the radio, needed loud, unamplified instruments. And Martin’s new designs rescued the company.

After the 1929 crash, Campbell Soup Company president Dr. John T. Dorrance, who had invented condensed soup in 1897, called for one thing: keep advertising. Canned condensed soup was pitched as a way for families to make their food budgets go further. Campbell’s responded with record sales volume and its highest-ever earnings in 1930.

The high oil content made mayonnaise expensive in 1933. Using a patented machine, Kraft mixed the mayonnaise with cheaper boiled salad dressing and spices and unveiled the new Miracle Whip at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Radio advertising helped it become the country’s top-selling spread within six months. Although most people refer to Miracle Whip as mayonnaise, it is not technically mayonnaise according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration standards, which require mayonnaise to contain 65 percent oil. It’s legally a “salad dressing spread.”

Kroger employee Michael J. Cullen leased an empty garage in Queens, New York, in August 1930, and opened his King Kullen grocery store, which the Smithsonian Institution considers the first “modern” supermarket in the United States. His elimination of counter clerks, introduction of self-service shelving, and purchasing goods in bulk enabled him to sell at 10 to 50 percent lower prices than other grocers. By 1936, the company operated 17 stores and generated $6 million in revenue per year.

As cash-strapped families gave up paid nights out at theaters, home radio offered free entertainment after just one purchase. RCA president David Sarnoff oversaw RCA’s production of cheap tabletop “midget” radios as well as the expansion of the NBC network. In America, radio set ownership increased from 40% of households in 1930 to more than 80% by 1940; RCA’s sales increased accordingly.

When orders fell during the Depression in the 1930s, Procter & Gamble maintained rather than reduced its marketing budget. P&G recognized that women were tuned into the radio as they went about their daily chores. The company began sponsoring serialized daytime radio shows to market its Oxydol laundry detergent, first with “Oxydol’s Own Ma Perkins” in 1933, thus creating the label “soap opera.” Its radio advertising budget was essentially doubling every other year, leaving Colgate and Lever Brothers behind.

With Prohibition winding down in September of 1933, two brothers, Ernest Gallo, 24, and Julio Gallo, 23, started E. & J. Gallo Winery in Modesto, California, following the deaths of their parents. They started with $5,900 in borrowed capital. According to company lore, the two learned everything they needed to know about winemaking from pamphlets in the UC Berkeley library, but they also had the advantage of their late father’s vineyard and wine-shipping business, which they inherited, to build on. Their focus was on making a cheap and affordable wine that anyone could buy, and the brothers made a $30,000 profit in their first year.

This content was created with the help of AI.